Issue 23
The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 23. To get the issue delivered straight to your door, subscribe now.…
Issue 21
The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 21. To get the issue delivered straight to your door, subscribe…
On Integration
This summer, amid the ongoing protests for racial justice, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility once again shot up the best-seller lists. The book, which had already…
On Birthrights
Whatever one thinks about the moral status of the existing global order, it is hard to imagine circumstances in which philosophical critique would make a…
On the Hatred of Literature
The hatred of literature, though it remains almost unheard of among the general reading public, has become the default mode in the upper reaches of…
American Nightmares
Eyal Peretz is a professor of comparative literature at Indiana University and a literary critic who has written books about Moby-Dick, Denis Diderot and the…
Mistakes We’ve Made
Patriotism is a moral mistake and an intellectual mistake, a mistake twice over. We are all subject to it.
Property Damage
This interview first appeared on Tocqueville21, a blog about twentieth-century democracy. ● With the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2013, Thomas Piketty…
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,…
“Don’t You Kneel”
WHEN THE EDITORS of this magazine began to talk about how to address this summer’s uprisings—hundreds of thousands taking to the streets in hundreds of American cities…
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…
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.
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.”
The Revolution Will Be Telegrammed
Hong Kong is again in the news with Beijing seeking to pass anti-dissent national security laws; crucially, it plans to do so via the National…
Simple Hearts
Much of what Dave taught me had to do with the sympathy and intelligence he applied to varieties of experience that that were alien to…
The Defender
He is the ambassador of a Jewish community rooted in an old Tehran that no longer exists.
Little Things Are Big Again
When the train stalled on the bridge, his face lost the subtle yellowish pink it’d held in Brooklyn. His eyes scoured the car—window, commuter, window,…
Foreword: “Little Things Are Big Again”
Two generations after sexual liberation, young people are having less sex than ever and nobody really knows why. Unprecedented forms of copulation and fantasy proliferate,…
The Patient Records
This piece is part of the Ferrante Project: 32 works by women writers and artists of color experimenting with freedom, anti-fame and anonymity. 1. It…
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,…
Restless Minds
This is the third column in the third round of Reading Room, a collective column on reading and life. In each round, the contributors respond to a prompt…
Guilt Lit
This is the second column in the third round of Reading Room, a collective column on reading and life. In each round, the contributors respond to…
In Defense of Longing
This is the first column in the third round of Reading Room, a collective column on reading and life. In each round, the contributors respond…