Books & Ideas

The Morality of Choice

Just how do I decide that a stone is worth taking home?

  • Deborah Stone

Bloody Abroad

Amanda Knox finds herself.

  • Merve Emre

On Being an Octopus

Nothing stretches our thinking about the mind the way an octopus does.

  • Peter Godfrey-Smith

Unacceptable

Paul Goodman was thinking globally and acting locally before it became a slogan.

  • Judith Levine

Little, Big

Big-time development economists are missing something.

  • Pranab Bardhan

Praying to Allah on Bastille Day

Winner of the 2012–2013 Boston Review Essay Contest

  • Kate Korman

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Lives of the Moral Saints

An Interview with Larissa MacFarquhar

  • David V. Johnson

Countee Cullen and the Racial Mountain

The life of the black poet.

  • Major Jackson

Flesh and Statue

How do we separate David Foster Wallace the person from DFW the icon?

  • Trevor Quirk

How Not to Put Students First

Michelle Rhee’s fixation on teachers misses other sources of educational inequality.

  • Robin West

The Cure for Loneliness

To Erich Fromm, humanity was always trading freedom for the comfort of external authority.

  • Vivian Gornick

Hard Money Man

Paul Volcker’s career of public service reads as a history of the last half-century of American money.

  • Jonathan Kirshner

Dance with Me

The Many Partners of Fred Astaire

  • Megan Pugh

An Embarrassment of Riches

Literature and the Ethics of Wealth in the Gilded Age

  • Gavin Jones

Still a Man’s World

The myth of women’s ascendance.

  • Philip N. Cohen

Forget Harry Potter

Adults Should Read Joan Aiken's Wolves

  • John Crowley

Femininjas

Women in Fiction Fight Back

  • Elizabeth Hand

The Next Left

An interview with Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin.

  • Jake Blumgart

Son of Madonna

Whereas Christians know Jesus as the son of God, Muslims know him simply as the son of Mary.

  • Haroon Moghul

Remarkable Facts

On Thomas Nagel’s radical claim that science should go teleological.

  • Elliott Sober

Free Market Fairness

Is there a moral case for free markets?

  • Martin O’Neill
  • Thad Williamson

A March to the Grave

Joseph Roth and the End of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

  • Roger Boylan

Before Greed

Americans Didn’t Always Yearn for Riches

  • Richard White

Head and Heart

Are conservatives more moral?

  • George Scialabba
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