Control Groups
Politics has become about questions of life and death again in a way that blows a hole in a key aspect of the Hobbesian liberal…
Off the Wave
Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. In addition to his recent book, Irrationality:…
What Was Possible
Tariq Goddard is an English writer and publisher. Along with the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher (1968-2017) and others, he launched Zero Books in 2009,…
The Crisis of Language Project
alt right: i) right-wing racists who use leftist rhetoric. ii) establishment.
The (Updated) Dictionary of Received Ideas
Classics, the: force of oppression. Know enough to despise ~: “Plato was an authoritarian.” “Aristotle condoned slavery.”
Intellectuals in Crisis
Intellectual Ex-Radicals and World Reaction: The Crisis of the Disillusioned Fellow-Travelers of Bolshevism Is Not the Same as a “Crisis of Marxism” (Trotsky 1939) The Intellectual:…
Muellerisms
The following is a collection of statements published in the New York Times about Robert S. Mueller, from 2001 to today.
Comedy Studies
The following are actual titles of papers published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Best of 2019
As 2019 draws to a close, we’re proud to present our top-ten most-read print essays of the year, listed below in reverse order. Although their…
On Choosing Life
It’s reasonable to wonder whether it’s fair to bring children into a deteriorating world, and yet it’s nevertheless hard to shake the suspicion that, for…
On Left Straussianism
Nobody shares all their private complaints with an audience, but how do we know how much to share and with whom? Certainly, in the name…
Letter on Denialism
In November, Politico published a profile of Claire Lehmann, the founder of the web magazine Quillette, which it hailed as the “unofficial digest” of the intellectual…
Limited Time
INTRODUCTION The subtitle of Martin Hägglund’s new book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, indicates its ambition. In the first half of This Life,…
The Life of the Mind
By some indicators we are entering a new Dark Age: anti-intellectual fervor is raging, suspicion of experts is at an all-time high and appeals to…
Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America arrives at an auspicious time. The French sociologist came initially to America to prepare a report on criminal justice,…
Working with the Earth
This fall and winter we invited people who work with the land—farmers, ranchers, foresters, ecologists and others—to tell us what they think the earth is…
Living in Prison
This summer, in partnership with Chicago Books to Women in Prison, we distributed a short survey to incarcerated women across the country, inviting them to…