Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Not in Your Genome

Generations of “sociobiologists” have tried and failed to argue that genetic analysis offers the key to understanding social inequality. A new book fares no better.

June 11, 2026 issue

Neal Ascherson

Hitler’s End

After the fall of Berlin the Soviets concealed their discovery of Hitler’s remains, leaving the Western Allies scrambling for evidence that he was dead.

June 11, 2026 issue

Lynn Hunt

Counting Heads

Jean-Paul Marat’s assassination transformed the reviled mouthpiece of revolutionary bloodthirstiness into the revered martyr of the people’s cause.

May 28, 2026 issue

Sanford Schwartz

The Fairy-Tale Hour

An exhibition of Paul Klee’s late works focuses on his depictions of the atmosphere of violence and intimidation in Germany after the Nazis came to power.

June 11, 2026 issue

Quinn Slobodian

Damming the Big Ocean

Edward Fishman’s Chokepoints explains how the US came to rely on its economic arsenal, but stops short of a complete assessment of the unreliable tactic and its often devastating consequences.

June 11, 2026 issue

Jonathan Mingle

Our Climate’s Wild Card

Methane’s part in the climate crisis remains largely overlooked, even though it is responsible for 30 percent of all global warming to date, and despite the fact that it’s still possible to purge it from our skies.

June 11, 2026 issue

Zadie Smith

Art for Our Sakes

Why should we go on making things?

June 11, 2026 issue

David W. Blight

Dreams of Our Nation

Historians must not cede the study of how Americans understand their cacophonous nation to advocates of “patriotic” history.

June 11, 2026 issue

It’s All in Your Head

Gavin Francis

The Dream of Forgetfulness

Two recent books build on an insight of Borges—that to live, it is necessary to forget.

March 9, 2023 issue

Alec Wilkinson

Illuminating the Brain’s ‘Utter Darkness’

A new biography considers the peculiar life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose discovery that nerve cells are individual completely overthrew the existing theory of the brain.

February 9, 2023 issue

John Gray

The Mind’s Body Problem

The belief that we’re different from other organisms may be an incurable human illusion.

December 2, 2021 issue

Gregory Hays

A Mind in Pain

For Robert Burton, describing melancholy was a way of describing the world. Two recent books on depression suggest that today, virtually all we know about the subject is still open to debate.

October 21, 2021 issue

David Cole on the Supreme Court

David Cole

Trump v. Trump

What happens when a president sues himself?

May 20, 2026

David Cole

The Second ‘Redemption’

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais deals a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act, using reasoning that Congress rejected more than forty years ago.

June 11, 2026 issue

David Cole

Born in the USA

For the Supreme Court to accept the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, it would have to repudiate the Constitution, its own precedents, and the long-standing position of all three branches of the US government.

April 23, 2026 issue

David Cole

The Lie of ‘Preventive’ War

Never has Donald Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran.

March 6, 2026

The Latest

Christian Donlan

The Archbishop’s Library

An audit against entropy

June 10, 2026

Dan Chiasson

Think for Yourself

One of the most dehumanizing effects of AI is the short cuts it offers through the gaps and impasses intrinsic to the act of writing.

June 25, 2026 issue

Meghan O’Gieblyn

‘We Did Our Best!’

Metaphors of parenting have defined our understanding of AI, but lately the parent-child relationship between creator and machine is becoming reversed.

June 25, 2026 issue

Erin Maglaque

Their Own Private Genesis

What if Augustine’s idea of original sin was wrong? Testimony from the Inquisition reveals freethinkers using their sexual experience to dispute the reign of shame and otherwise critique Church doctrine.

June 25, 2026 issue

David S. Reynolds

Image Crazy

In the decades before the Civil War, innovations in printmaking and photography created a “rage for pictures” that transformed American visual culture.

June 25, 2026 issue

Madeleine Schwartz

Paper Trail

The investigation into the origin of papyrus fragments that the owners of Hobby Lobby purchased from an Oxford scholar underscores papyrology’s long history of shady deals and ulterior motives.

June 25, 2026 issue

Andrew Arsan

Unmaking the Middle East

In two recent books the scholar and commentator Fawaz Gerges asks why the region remains a bastion of authoritarian government, prone to conflict and instability, instead of becoming an economic success story.

June 25, 2026 issue

Magda Teter

A Different Country Came to Them

Until Greece annexed Salonica in 1912, it had long been a city where “all peoples” used to pass. How did its Jews come to be eliminated and their history erased?

June 25, 2026 issue

Samuel Earle

The Sage of Washington

Walter Lippmann was the most influential political commentator of his generation, but behind his preternatural confidence was a far more complicated and unsettled character.

May 28, 2026 issue