Some literary theorists fawn over Freud, others love Lacan, while others still ...
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Whose Life?
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by the philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale, is a book anyone committed to public-facing scholarship ought to take note of. This is all the ...
Public Thinker: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on Dark Matter and White Empiricism
How Can Democracy and Criminal Justice Reform Coexist?
Ending mass incarceration in America isn’t just a matter of reforming a few aspects ...
How Ken Liu Translates, and Why He Writes
Ken Liu is a celebrated author of American speculative fiction and a pathbreaking translator of Chinese science fiction into English. He has won the ...
Resisting the Rhetoric of Disaster
Ever since the Arab world achieved political independence, its great hopes for self-determination and freedom have been built up and razed down several times ...
Borders, Guns, and Freedom
Like the pioneers two hundred years before him, Mark Romano recently decided to head West. Like those pioneers, Mark—a white, unemployed electrician ...
How Liberal Americans Sustain Israel’s Occupation
Why has the United States historically supported Israel? And should the ...
John Kennedy Toole @50
Thelma Toole, the mother of the novelist John Kennedy Toole—author of the extraordinary almost-unpublished novel A Confederacy of Dunces—delivered one of the most irresponsible accusations in ...
The World the Gulf Has Built
The viewing platform of the Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building in the world, provides an exceptional view. On a clear day, you can see Dubai’s towers ...
In Memoriam: Agnes Heller
Agnes Heller, the Hungarian-born political philosopher, died recently, at the age of 90. The obituaries in outlets like the New York Times, Le Monde, and Deutsche Welle have been respectful, and even ...
Can a Recipe Save Your Life?
A recipe can be more than a guide to making food. A recipe can be a mantra, a ritual, a symbolic stay against chaos in the psyche and in the world. A hybrid genre ...
Who Cares about Literary Prizes?
Earlier this morning, the Booker Prize judges announced their shortlist for 2019, stamping just six novels—out of the ...
Gig Authoritarians
In 2015, Stephen Colbert asked cofounder and then CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick how the company’s heavy investment in driverless car technology squared with its purported “commitment” to its “driver ...
Idleness as Flourishing
It is hard work to write a book, so there is unavoidable irony in fashioning a volume on the value of being idle. There is a paradox, too: to praise idleness is to suggest that there is some point to ...
Counter-histories of the Internet
What could the internet have been? We’ve grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics ...
What Essays Are, and What Essayists Do
There are no good books about essays, only essays. The first practitioner of the form, the 16th-century French politician and minor aristocrat Michel de ...
Translators and Other Icons
Writers are sexy figures. Until recently, we tended to imagine them as drunk and glamorous, Hemingway at the bar in Cuba or Frank O’Hara partying with artists ...
San Francisco; or, How to Destroy a City
As New York City and Greater Washington, DC, prepared for the arrival of Amazon’s new secondary headquarters, Torontonians opened a section of their ...
The Return of Homer’s Women
Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, and Madeline Miller’s Circe speak the lost and muted voices of ancient Greek women ...
