Uncertainty about where we find ourselves in political time—“back to the future,” back to the GOP of 1989, or back to Germany ...

In Crito and Phaedo, Plato takes this alliance between Socrates and poetry further, attributing to Socrates direct acts of ...

Amid deficit-allergic neoliberal politics, everyone can agree on the appeal of budgetary savings. So now it is not just liberals going after mass incarceration. A group of brand-name conservatives, ...

This is the first installment of a new column by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. It appears in print in our Fall 2025 issue; subscribe to get a copy. In 1962, eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell received a series ...

This essay appears in print in our Fall 2025 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. “The personal is the political” was a reality for me long before it became the mantra of Second Wave feminism in the United ...

In the late 1940s, the Cold War was heating up. In the United States anticommunism had reached a fever pitch at the same time that antiblack violence had forcefully re-emerged in the form of lynching ...

In 1947 Julian Huxley, English evolutionary theorist and director-general of UNESCO, wrote Mohandas Gandhi to ask him to contribute an essay to a collection of philosophical reflections on human ...

Rare is the CEO today who, in the face of public concern about a potentially dangerous product, says, “Let’s hire the best scientists to figure out if the problem is real and then, if it is, stop ...

In 1979 Benjamin Netanyahu and his father Benzion—both newly returned to Israel—convened, in Jerusalem, the first-ever conference on “international terrorism.” The event was hosted by the Jonathan ...

The Italian novelist Italo Calvino was unusually optimistic about the invention of a “literature machine.” In his 1967 essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” he imagines a computer that would be “capable of ...

Dear Members of the Board of Governors, West Virginians, and all Americans: We write at a potentially cataclysmic moment for West Virginia University (WVU), where we are professors. As the flagship ...