Ideas

Philosophy & Religion

Erin Maglaque

Wings of Desire

A gullible new book raises the question of how we should interpret the history of the supernatural in early modernity.

April 4, 2024 issue

Meghan O’Gieblyn

The Trouble with Reality

William Egginton’s intellectual biography of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg takes place at the intersection of physics and religion, and traces the errors that result when we forget the limits of our human point of view.

March 21, 2024 issue

John Banville

‘Live All You Can’

The early lives of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James were marked by the loss of loved ones, and in their reflections one finds a characteristically nineteenth-century American sense of resilience and regeneration.

March 7, 2024 issue

Robert Pogue Harrison

At Ease Amid the Ruins

Costica Bradatan and Geoff Dyer explore the virtues of failure and humility in the face of the next-to-nothingness of human existence.

March 7, 2024 issue

David S. Reynolds

‘A Fiendish Fascination’

The representation of Jews in antebellum popular culture reveals that many Americans found them both cartoonishly villainous and enticingly exotic.

February 22, 2024 issue

Jessica Riskin

A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head

Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.”

June 25, 2023

Marina Warner

Temporale

During the pandemic I picked up the Catholic missal of my childhood, and it made me think again about its function: marking the passage of time.

April 14, 2023

Lucy Ives

What You Don’t Know Your Mind Knows

Renee Gladman’s drawings trouble the eye’s desire for cut-and-dried distinctions between word and image.

March 4, 2023

On Watching the Skies

Frederick C. Crews

The Mindsnatchers

Misleading optical effects, half-waking dreams, sleep paralysis, tricks of memory, paranoid delusions, temporal lobe lesions, intoxication, fraud, and faddism are abundantly familiar to us, whereas the UFO thesis flouts the known laws of nature at every turn.

June 25, 1998 issue

Gunther S. Stent

A Close Encounter

So we arrive at Francis Crick’s directed panspermia hypothesis: a few billion years ago, a technically advanced extraterrestrial civilization sent a rocket carrying a diversity of bacteria to Earth. The rocket discharged its cargo into the primeval soup, where the tiny creatures were fruitful and multiplied.

December 3, 1981 issue

Martin Gardner

The Third Coming

“For those who cannot believe in the Second Coming, or the Messianic hopes of orthodox Judaism, there are the UFOs! If the earth is being visited by extraterrestrials, surely the aliens must be friendly or by now we would have learned otherwise.”

January 26, 1978 issue

James R. Newman

Sharing the Universe

With the advent of radioastronomy, the scope of investigations of outer space has been enormously widened as the strange music of incredibly remote spheres keeps pouring into steerable dishes and saucers of all kinds and sizes.

February 1, 1963 issue

The Latest

Martha C. Nussbaum

Reports from the Slaughterhouse

A century after Upton Sinclair exposed the inhumane and unhygienic conditions of Chicago’s stockyards, life for animals in America’s factory farms and slaughterhouses is still gruesome.

December 19, 2024 issue

Erin Maglaque

Soundscapes of the Silenced

In late Renaissance Florence one in five women lived behind institutional walls whose rule was sensory mortification. Historians are struggling to recover their inexpressible secrets.

December 5, 2024 issue

Adam Kirsch

In Search of Fullness

In his new book, the philosopher Charles Taylor looks at modern poetry as a unique record of spiritual experience in a secular age.

December 5, 2024 issue

Rozina Ali

God’s Directive

After the September 11 attacks, evangelical American missionaries followed military tanks into Afghanistan and Iraq to convert Muslims as part of a holy war.

November 21, 2024 issue

Jack Hanson

Last Rites

Executions prevent any possibility that the condemned might someday reconcile with the world, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church maintains that they are “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” So why do powerful American Catholics still support the practice?

October 20, 2024

Elizabeth Kolbert

Savvy in the Grass

Some botanists maintain that peas are capable of associative learning, others that tropical vines have a sort of vision. If plants possess sentience, what is the morally appropriate response?

October 3, 2024 issue

Patricia J. Williams

‘This Head, These Limbs’

After encountering a mysterious painting of amputation, I found myself thinking about severed legs, personal freedom, contracts, and the law.

June 25, 2024

Mark Lilla

The Tower and the Sewer

Catholic postliberal thinkers opposed to modern liberal individualism are less interested in transforming people’s unhappy lives through the power of the gospel than in jockeying for political power as the vanguard of a conservative revolution.

June 20, 2024 issue

Meghan O’Gieblyn

Leaving the Fold

The memoir of a former nun who left her convent after twelve years reveals the contradictions of the monastic life as well as the limits of memoir.

June 20, 2024 issue

Susan Neiman

Fanon the Universalist

Adam Shatz argues in his new biography of Frantz Fanon that the supposed patron saint of political violence was instead a visionary of a radical universalism that rejected racial essentialism and colonialism.

June 6, 2024 issue