Philosophy & Religion

The Jewish Authenticity Trap

Dara Horn’s fierce, often insightful cri de coeur presents a strangely selective picture of Jewishness, cropping a rich, messy, diverse, and complex history to fit into a tightly focused frame.

November 24, 2022 issue

Martha C. Nussbaum

A Peopled Wilderness

We must find new ways to act toward animals in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity.

December 8, 2022 issue

John Banville

‘A God Can Do It’

For Rilke, the artist’s task is to absorb the realm of things and thereby transform it into something rich and strange.

November 3, 2022 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Symphilosophizing in Jena

The intellectual achievements of the early German Romantics were inseparable from their friendships and feuds.

October 20, 2022 issue

Christopher Benfey

Emerson & His ‘Big Brethren’

“‘You are yourself a sequoia,’ John Muir told Emerson during the philosopher’s trip to California in 1871. ‘Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren.’”

October 20, 2022 issue

Tim Parks

The Pope’s Many Silences

A new account of Pius XII’s actions during World War II gives the impression of a pope who lacked any clear moral or political vision and made every decision on the basis of the merest expediency.

October 20, 2022 issue

Sue Halpern

Before the Fall

As evangelicals came into the GOP tent, Republican voters and politicians traded women’s bodies for political power.

May 11, 2022

Malise Ruthven

The Long Reach of the Satanic Verses

The violent controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel can be traced back to the early days of Islam.

September 25, 2022

The Latest

Gary Shteyngart

Beyond the Pale

After the Russian Revolution, Jews left behind the shtetl and had to navigate a modern identity: New Soviet Man.

February 9, 2023 issue

Marilynne Robinson

A Theology of the Present Moment

Can bringing Scripture and science back into dialogue help answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing?

December 22, 2022 issue

William Dalrymple

Missionaries, Merlins, and Merchants

Recent scholarship illuminates how medieval Southeast Asia transformed Indian cultural and religious ideas brought to the region by monks and traders.

December 22, 2022 issue

Lynn Hunt

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

December 8, 2022 issue

Corey Robin

Empathy & the Economy

The left is still preoccupied with the decades-old debate over which is more important: recognition of our identities or material redistribution. Adam Smith ended that argument before it began.

December 8, 2022 issue

Kathryn Hughes

Department of Speculation

A new book on the history of a group of British clairvoyants charged with predicting disasters maintains a scrupulous neutrality as to whether these precognitions were coincidences or supernatural happenings.

November 3, 2022 issue

David S. Reynolds

Throngs of Unseen People

In the Houses of Their Dead, Terry Alford’s history of spiritualism during the Civil War era, suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

October 6, 2022 issue

Elaine Blair

Questioning Desire

Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is rare in its ability to speak to a plural audience—queer and straight, multiracial and multigendered—with the assumption that we have some common interests in sex and dating even if we have varied experiences of them.

September 22, 2022 issue

Gregory Hays

The Last Reversal

Two books consider the stories we’ve told ourselves over thousands of years about the way the world ends.

August 18, 2022 issue

Apropos of Nothing

Nonbeing belongs to that category of concepts that seem self-evident and self-explanatory, but have been objects of deepest perplexity for philosophers.

July 21, 2022 issue