Books & Ideas

Exploring the Hidden China

Yu Hua's Boy in the Twilight.

  • Drew Calvert

Being Jewish in Today’s Germany

Yascha Mounk explores Jewish identity in modern Germany.

  • Lucy McKeon

Dogs Are Not People

Why are we so desperate to assume animals must be like us?

  • Colin Dayan

Lost Radicals

The internationalism of black radicals was an alternative to a universalism that wasn’t universal.

  • Eric Mann

Schools and Citizens

The failure of corporate reform.

  • Robin West

What Can Blind People Tell Us About Race?

Blind people are constantly socialized to pay attention to race and its significance.

 

  • Osagie K. Obasogie

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Is Life a Ponzi Scheme?

Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife uses doomsday thought experiments to figure out what makes life meaningful. 

  • Mark Johnston

Do Game Changers Matter?

Political science and political reporting.

  • Lynn Vavreck

An America That Never Was: Norman Rockwell’s Vision

American Mirror, the new biography of Norman Rockwell.

  • Elizabeth Hand

Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools

What advocates of market-based reform miss.

  • Jeffrey Aaron Snyder

Made to Burn: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers

A nominee for the National Book Award.

  • Marta Figlerowicz

What Are Radicals Good For?

An interview with George Scialabba on utopia, the hive mind, reviewers, and intellectuals.

  • Lindsey Gilbert
  • George Scialabba

Illiberal Reform

Why Did Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Fail?

  • Lisa Blaydes

Crying Wolf: Democracies in Crisis

An interview with David Runciman

  • David Runciman

The Marriage of Granite and Rainbow: A Biography of Robert Duncan

Lisa Jarnot offers a glimpse into the academic and artistic communities of Robert Duncan.

  • Brian Teare

Rodolfo Walsh and the Struggle for Argentina

Before In Cold Blood, there was Operation Massacre.

  • Stephen Phelan

Do the Right Thing

On Italo Calvino’s letters, 1941–1985.

  • Leland de la Durantaye

Hardscrabble

The novel House of Earth shows Woody Guthrie in a different light, exiled from the Dust Bowl but dreaming of it still.

  • Megan Pugh

Empire’s Wasteland

The cause of Camus’s native countrymen moved him, yet he yearned helplessly toward the European culture that had formed him.

  • Vivian Gornick

The Republic of Choosing

Cass Sunstein's new book shows that "nudging" has its limits.

  • William H. Simon

What’s Wrong with Technological Fixes?

Evgeny Morozov answers questions about his new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.

  • Evgeny Morozov
  • Terry Winograd

The Rise of Narendra Modi

A new biography tells the story of his rise to political prominence.

  • Zahir Janmohamed

The Secret History of the Haitian Earthquake

A Conversation with Jonathan M. Katz

  • Colin Dayan

War Without Strategy

The United States relies on drones to make up for its lack of coherent policy in the war on terrorism.

  • Jonathan Hafetz
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