Books & Ideas

A Moment for Primo Levi

Nearly thirty years later, the circumstances of Primo Levi’s death continue to provoke debate.

  • Boston Review

Resisting Antibiotics

The social challenges of drug reform

  • Robert Bud

Ghost in the Machine

Is digital life soulless or the site of a new transcendence?

  • Jenny Hendrix

Historical Method and the Noble Lie

Mass incarceration is so politicized that we can't talk about its origins.

  • Michael Javen Fortner

The Unseen Threat of Capital Mobility

Off-shoring, tax havens, and other scourges of globalization.

  • Marshall Steinbaum

Reliable Rebel

Jeremy Corbyn and the Revival of the Radical Left

  • Martin O’Neill

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Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?

Michael Javen Fortner’s Black Silent Majority makes the controversial case that African Americans backed the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

  • Donna Murch

Come On Up, Sweetheart

James Baldwin’s letters to his brother.

  • Ed Pavlić

The Gore Vidal Museum

The author's bid against being forgotten.

  • Daniel Luzer

Half a Loaf

In Israel and Palestine, two states are still better than one.

  • Assaf Sharon

The People’s Technocracy

But do transparency and smarter government have the power to effect major changes?

  • Andrew Mayersohn

Feeling into Action

On Lori Gruen’s Entangled Empathy

  • Colin Dayan

I’m Fine How I Am

A response to Randall Kennedy’s defense of respectability politics.

  • Christopher Lebron

Our Panics, Ourselves

Richard Beck’s new book on the moral panic over child abuse in the 1980s.

  • Rebecca Onion

Finding Your Way Home

Philosophy constantly invents new ways to falsely intellectualize our relationship to things that we do.

  • Peter Godfrey-Smith

The Passion of Ellen Willis

On the feminist essayist, journalist, and music critic who championed women’s liberation.

  • Judith Levine

Wharton, Colette, Lispector

Between 1885 and 1943, three brilliant female novelists married young, to men who would never understand their passions or come to terms with the scope of their gifts.

  • Max Nelson

How Should a Friendship Be?

On the reissue of Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk.

  • Maggie Doherty

Too Much Information

Making Transparency Good for You

  • Elena Fagotto
  • Archon Fung

A Science of Literature

It has been said that computation will mark the end of humanistic inquiry. Actual literary research in this vein suggests otherwise.

  • Ben Merriman

Archipelagos of Experience

Translating Southeaster by Haroldo Conti.

  • Jessica Sequeira

How Not to Be Elizabeth Gilbert

For female travel writers, it’s a risk.

  • Jessa Crispin

Training for Neoliberalism

Behavioral economics and its ideological tendencies.

  • John McMahon

Your Own Worst Enemy

Every day we transgress against our own longing to act well.

  • Vivian Gornick
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