In a perverse twist virtue signaling, the Trump administration is training Americans in the politics of raw domination.

The 2014 English publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century made the French economist Thomas Piketty a household name. The bestselling book, and the discussions that surrounded its release, ...

I would like to stage a fight between two different accounts of the current political landscape—what’s been called the “post-truth” era, the infodemic, the end of democracy, or perhaps most accurately ...

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, ...

“Space is big,” wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). “You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down ...

Science is under fire as never before in the United States. Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump and his Republican allies dismiss the findings of health experts as casually as those of ...

This essay appears in print in Is Equal Opportunity Enough?. In June 2020 Donald Trump tweeted, in characteristically hyperbolic style, that his administration had “done more for the Black Community ...

Like U.S. history, classical music has become a new front in the culture wars as musicians and music institutions grapple with the legacies of racism. With most performing arts organizations shuttered ...

This essay is part of an Election Chronicle series in our Winter 2025 issue, Trump’s Return. I am baffled, as I was in 2016, as to why so many liberals are still shocked by Trump’s victory—and why, in ...

Though true and important, the warning has hardened into the familiarity of a cliché. Stock examples of so-called spurious correlations are now a dime a dozen. As one example goes, a Pacific island ...

Beginning in the late 1860s, the decade that it took to construct the Suez Canal, photographs depicting its feats of engineering circulated across the world. Sold to travelers as souvenirs, featured ...