Books & Ideas

What We Owe to Each Other

David Graeber on student loan debt, academia, and the value of education.

  • David Graeber
  • David V. Johnson

What We Owe to Each Other

David Graeber on why we don’t put babies’ lives ahead of Citibank’s shareholders and whether we should renew the tradition of debt jubilees.

  • David Graeber
  • David V. Johnson

Can Apple Shape Up?

Examining the global supply chains and labor practices of the high-tech industry.

  • Dara O’Rourke
  • David V. Johnson

The Networked Era: An Interview with Michael Nielsen

Why discussion boards and online marketplaces can make it easier for scientists to pool their data and find far-flung collaborators.

  • Michael Nielsen
  • Lindsey Gilbert

Cheating Death

Philosophers Ponder the Afterlife

  • Alex Byrne

Not So Nasty, Brutish, and Short

Steven Pinker’s Good News

  • Claude S. Fischer

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Occupation as Fairness

What John Rawls Would Make of the Occupy Movement

  • Joshua Cohen
  • Seth Resler

Reclaiming the Republic

In his latest book, Lawrence Lessig argues that Congress has become so corrupted by moneyed interests and has so undermined the public trust that our very republic is at risk.

  • Lawrence Lessig
  • David V. Johnson

Violence and Human Progress

A Correspondence on Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature

  • Morgan Meis
  • S. Abbas Raza

The People and the Patriots

Who led whom in the American Revolution?

  • Alfred F. Young

Unpacking

It’s strange to think of Katchor’s work as lifelike, but there it is. Its lifelikeness is partly a function of the felt possibility of ongoing randomness inherent in the comic-strip mode.

  • John Crowley

From the Editors: November/December 2011

  • Deborah Chasman
  • Joshua Cohen

Where Love Grows

Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot is about becoming an adult, about moving, marrying, and making mistakes.

  • Leland de la Durantaye

What Would Emma Do?

An interview with Vivian Gornick about the mother of anarchism.

  • Vivian Gornick
  • David V. Johnson

Priest, Gangster, Drinker, Gent

Reading Flann in the birthplace of psychoanalysis. 

  • Roger Boylan

My Hungry Soul

Alfred Kazin’s raw materials.

  • Vivian Gornick

Seriously Funny

On Howard Jacobson, the Jewish Jane Austen.

  • Roger Boylan

From the Editors: September/October 2011

  • Deborah Chasman
  • Joshua Cohen

Revaluing the Book

An interview with Richard Nash.

  • Richard Nash
  • Matt Runkle

What’s in a Name?

A Case for Pseudonyms

  • Jillian C. York

Thinking in an Emergency

An Interview with Elaine Scarry

  • David V. Johnson
  • Elaine Scarry

All About Obama

Five books consider the Obama presidency.

  • Mark Schmitt

On the March

Hungary’s ascendant right wing.

  • Paul Hockenos

Square Dance

Agnes de Mille’s Beloved Community

  • Megan Pugh
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