Erin Maglaque Wings of Desire A gullible new book raises the question of how we should interpret the history of the supernatural in early modernity. April 4, 2024 issue
Meghan O’Gieblyn The Trouble with Reality William Egginton’s intellectual biography of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg takes place at the intersection of physics and religion, and traces the errors that result when we forget the limits of our human point of view. March 21, 2024 issue
John Banville ‘Live All You Can’ The early lives of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James were marked by the loss of loved ones, and in their reflections one finds a characteristically nineteenth-century American sense of resilience and regeneration. March 7, 2024 issue
Robert Pogue Harrison At Ease Amid the Ruins Costica Bradatan and Geoff Dyer explore the virtues of failure and humility in the face of the next-to-nothingness of human existence. March 7, 2024 issue
David S. Reynolds ‘A Fiendish Fascination’ The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic. February 22, 2024 issue
Jessica Riskin A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.” June 25, 2023
Marina Warner Temporale During the pandemic I picked up the Catholic missal of my childhood, and it made me think again about its function: marking the passage of time. April 14, 2023
Lucy Ives What You Don’t Know Your Mind Knows Renee Gladman’s drawings trouble the eye’s desire for cut-and-dried distinctions between word and image. March 4, 2023
Frederick C. Crews The Mindsnatchers Misleading optical effects, half-waking dreams, sleep paralysis, tricks of memory, paranoid delusions, temporal lobe lesions, intoxication, fraud, and faddism are abundantly familiar to us, whereas the UFO thesis flouts the known laws of nature at every turn. June 25, 1998 issue
Gunther S. Stent A Close Encounter So we arrive at Francis Crick’s directed panspermia hypothesis: a few billion years ago, a technically advanced extraterrestrial civilization sent a rocket carrying a diversity of bacteria to Earth. The rocket discharged its cargo into the primeval soup, where the tiny creatures were fruitful and multiplied. December 3, 1981 issue
Martin Gardner The Third Coming “For those who cannot believe in the Second Coming, or the Messianic hopes of orthodox Judaism, there are the UFOs! If the earth is being visited by extraterrestrials, surely the aliens must be friendly or by now we would have learned otherwise.” January 26, 1978 issue
James R. Newman Sharing the Universe With the advent of radioastronomy, the scope of investigations of outer space has been enormously widened as the strange music of incredibly remote spheres keeps pouring into steerable dishes and saucers of all kinds and sizes. February 1, 1963 issue
Patricia J. Williams ‘This Head, These Limbs’ After encountering a mysterious painting of amputation, I found myself thinking about severed legs, personal freedom, contracts, and the law. June 25, 2024
Mark Lilla The Tower and the Sewer Catholic postliberal thinkers opposed to modern liberal individualism are less interested in transforming people’s unhappy lives through the power of the gospel than in jockeying for political power as the vanguard of a conservative revolution. June 20, 2024 issue
Meghan O’Gieblyn Leaving the Fold The memoir of a former nun who left her convent after twelve years reveals the contradictions of the monastic life as well as the limits of memoir. June 20, 2024 issue
Susan Neiman Fanon the Universalist Adam Shatz argues in his new biography of Frantz Fanon that the supposed patron saint of political violence was instead a visionary of a radical universalism that rejected racial essentialism and colonialism. June 6, 2024 issue
Peter Brown The Workings of the Spirit A new history of Christianity traces its transformation over a thousand years from an enormous diversity of beliefs and practices to Catholic uniformity. June 6, 2024 issue
Peter Godfrey-Smith Visible and Invisible Worlds While our brains do not simply mirror our surroundings, animals—nonhuman and human—are exquisitely embedded, suspended, in nature’s energies. June 6, 2024 issue
Tiya Miles How Bondage Built the Church Rachel Swarns’s recent book about a mass sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is simultaneously the legacy of resistance. May 23, 2024 issue
Nathaniel Rich Ufologists, Unite! Belief in UFOs sits uneasily between science and theology. April 18, 2024 issue
David Cole Who’s Canceling Whom? Conservatives often charge their opponents with “cancel culture,” but the right poses as significant a threat to free speech as the left. February 8, 2024 issue
Ian Frazier The Plunder and the Pity Alicia Puglionesi explores the damage white supremacy did to Native Americans and their land. February 8, 2024 issue