Ideas

Philosophy & Religion

With Liberals Like These

Twice in modern Russian history—in 1905 and in 1985—liberal reformers have gained influence only to be succeeded by autocratic regimes.

February 13, 2025 issue

Robyn Creswell

Bewildered Rhapsodies

The difficult history of translating a miraculous text

February 13, 2025 issue

Jessica Riskin

Turtles All the Way Up

The idea that living beings have no free will might sound scientific today, but it remains as dogmatic as it has always been.

February 13, 2025 issue

Caroline Fraser

Dispirited Away

The rise and fall of an evangelical church, founded with progressive intentions and undone by dissension and bad faith

January 16, 2025 issue

Jack Hanson

Last Rites

Executions prevent any possibility that the condemned might someday reconcile with the world, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church maintains that they are “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” So why do powerful American Catholics still support the practice?

October 20, 2024

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

On Watching the Skies

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

The Latest

Peter Singer

Circling the Good

In his new book the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel asks whether humans are capable of redefining morality itself.

April 24, 2025 issue

Miri Rubin

Christian Hair

The historical claim that Christianity replaced Judaism as a superior faith resulted in laws and language that persecuted Jews—and laid a foundation for white supremacy, too, a new book argues.

April 10, 2025 issue

Sally Rooney

Angles of Approach

Ronnie O’Sullivan is the greatest snooker player in history—what he can do, no one has ever been able to do. And no one can even explain how he does it.

March 27, 2025 issue

James Gleick

The Prophet Business

There have always been oracles, prophets, soothsayers, utopians, seers, or futurologists to make predictions about what will pass, and no matter how often they are wrong or discredited, humanity’s need remains.

February 27, 2025 issue

Anna Louie Sussman

Waiting by the Phone

Have our intimate lives taken on the worst features of the free market?

February 27, 2025 issue

Martha C. Nussbaum

Reports from the Slaughterhouse

A century after Upton Sinclair exposed the inhumane and unhygienic conditions of Chicago’s stockyards, life for animals in America’s factory farms and slaughterhouses is still gruesome.

December 19, 2024 issue

Erin Maglaque

Soundscapes of the Silenced

In late Renaissance Florence one in five women lived behind institutional walls whose rule was sensory mortification. Historians are struggling to recover their inexpressible secrets.

December 5, 2024 issue

Adam Kirsch

In Search of Fullness

In his new book, the philosopher Charles Taylor looks at modern poetry as a unique record of spiritual experience in a secular age.

December 5, 2024 issue

Rozina Ali

God’s Directive

After the September 11 attacks, evangelical American missionaries followed military tanks into Afghanistan and Iraq to convert Muslims as part of a holy war.

November 21, 2024 issue

Elizabeth Kolbert

Savvy in the Grass

Some botanists maintain that peas are capable of associative learning, others that tropical vines have a sort of vision. If plants possess sentience, what is the morally appropriate response?

October 3, 2024 issue