Books & Ideas

Age of Anxiety

The old ideas won't work in the war on terror.

  • Kevin Mattson

Narayan Days

Rereading the master.

  • Jhumpa Lahiri

Politics as Usual

How the Republicans came to rule the South

  • Jefferson Decker

Bridge Building

On writing Brookland.

  • Emily Barton

What Mind–Body Problem?

Understanding consciousness may be easier than we thought.

  • Alex Byrne

Name Calling

Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt.

  • Andrée Greene

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The Crusader

Why we must take Osama bin Laden’s writings seriously.

  • Khaled Abou El Fadl

Freedom Reigns

But it isn't enough.

  • Nick Bromell

The Dreamlife of Rupert Thomson

"Whenever I start a new book I have nightmares. Night after night."

  • James Hynes

A Broken Place

Pieces of Air in the Epic by Brenda Hillman.

  • Amy Newlove Schroeder

Learning from Athens

Success by design.

  • Josiah Ober

Ending Polarization

The good news about the culture wars

  • John Gastil
  • Dan M. Kahan
  • Donald Braman

Ian McEwan’s Family Values

 A once-in-a-generation writer.

  • Roger Boylan

The Drifters

Why the Supreme Court Makes Justices More Liberal

  • Jon D. Hanson
  • Adam Benforado

A Cartoon World

Daniel Clowes’s “comic-strip novel” Ice Haven.

  • Ken Parille

A World Without Race

Does black nationalism have to go too?

  • Dorothy Roberts

Knowing Our Minds

Why some philosophers say we can’t.

  • Alex Byrne

Do the Right Thing

Cognitive science’s search for a common morality.

  • Rebecca Saxe

30 Years of Boston Review

  • Deborah Chasman
  • Joshua Cohen

Little Criminals

Reading Richard Hughes.

  • John Crowley

Robert Capa’s Hope

The photographer wanted to show what freedom, and the people who made it, looked like.

  • Susie Linfield

Is Snow White?

And other questions about appearance and reality.

  • Alex Byrne

The Mark of Exile

An excerpt from The Cigar Roller. 

  • Pablo Medina

Creator and Destroyer

The rivalry between J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller was a rivalry to end the world.

  • Vivian Gornick
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