Aug. 28, 2023 | In combating fascism, 20th-century theologians like Oskar Goldberg strove for a “politics of immortality” ... more »
Aug. 25, 2023 | Forgiveness, messy and ambiguous, encourages an expansive moral imagination. To understand it, turn to literature... more »
Aug. 24, 2023 | Chasing Agnes Martin. The painter declared that “artists must of necessity be alone” — but also that “asceticism is a mistake”... more »
Aug. 23, 2023 | “The basic error of liberalism, according to the post-liberals, is its conflation of freedom with the absence of limitation or constraint”... more »
Aug. 22, 2023 | “Digital culture functions today as the Enlightenment cosmopolis once did: as a fantasy in which society reshapes itself along the lines of affinity”... more »
Aug. 21, 2023 | In 1450, an Italian monk began work on a map that took several years to complete. It was the most accurate map of the known world... more »
Aug. 18, 2023 | August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Fences was his most financially successful. It was also his least favorite... more »
Aug. 17, 2023 | Was it Orwell’s wife, Eileen, who persuaded him to turn an anti-Stalinist essay into an allegory?... more »
Aug. 16, 2023 | Is Jonathan Israel's decadeas-long argument for the importance of Spinoza the work of a prophet or a zealot?... more »
Aug. 15, 2023 | Kierkegaard’s engagement crisis. His philosophical career began when he broke up with his fiancée, Regine Olsen, in 1841... more »
Aug. 14, 2023 | How Harry Smith, a gnome-like polymath with a compulsive urge to document, mined his collection of folk-music records to feed the imagination of a generation... more »
Aug. 11, 2023 | If marriages are "hideously private," as Iris Murdoch said, can the study of one relationship reveal a grand theory of intimacy?... more »
Aug. 10, 2023 | “On the American right, there is a growing intuition that the problem with liberal democracy is not just the adjective. It is also the noun”... more »
Aug. 9, 2023 | From writers like Sylvia Plath and Ottessa Moshfegh, sad-girl literature presents a smorgasbord of unlikable protagonists... more »
Aug. 8, 2023 | Who was Homer? How was the Iliad composed? Robin Lane Fox has answers, though not always convincing ones... more »
Aug. 7, 2023 | Christopher Rufo is leading Florida’s right-wing attack on universities. Is he also, as he aspires, an intellectual historian? Not quite... more »
Aug. 4, 2023 | Real conversation is characterized by serendipity, spontaneity, and disagreement. It is harder and harder to come by... more »
Aug. 3, 2023 | The political scientist Patrick J. Deneen wants conservatives to wield raw political power and the “force of a threat” to topple the liberal order... more »
Aug. 2, 2023 | As cathartic as venting one’s rage may be, moral grandstanding accomplishes little beyond that fleeting satisfaction... more »
Aug. 1, 2023 | Beautiful and rich, Marguerite Harrison could have lived a quiet life in Baltimore. Instead she became a spy... more »
July 31, 2023 | Post-liberals and their ascendant ideas are as much a threat to conservatives as they are to liberals ... more »
July 28, 2023 | We've entered the age of the physics beach read, alternately profound and whimsical strolls through the science, says Sam Kean. Results are mixed... more »
July 27, 2023 | Creativity used to be the work of gods. Then poets and artists. Then all of us. The concept has been democratized, but it's also done real harm ... more »
July 26, 2023 | Can plants lie, as a new book claims? Or is a nervous system a precondition for the ability to deceive?... more »
July 25, 2023 | John Rawls offers a rich range of rules for thinking. But apply his thinking to a political or practical scheme? That’s trickier... more »