Ideas

Philosophy & Religion

Think for Yourself

One of the most dehumanizing effects of AI is the short cuts it offers through the gaps and impasses intrinsic to the act of writing.

June 25, 2026 issue

Greg Grandin

The Education of Pope Leo XIV

As a young missionary in Peru, the pope witnessed a war on liberation theology—and was indelibly stamped by the movement’s commitment to the poor.

May 24, 2026

Jenny Uglow

Wonder & Disillusion

The naturalist George Forster was fascinated by plants and animals, but he was also driven by a passionate belief in the rights of all people regardless of race, gender, or social status.

July 23, 2026 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Reassembling Bakhtin

Since Mikhail Bakhtin became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has perplexed readers for its seemingly contradictory stance to everything else he wrote.

June 25, 2026 issue

Erin Maglaque

Their Own Private Genesis

What if Augustine’s idea of original sin was wrong? Testimony from the Inquisition reveals freethinkers using their sexual experience to dispute the reign of shame and otherwise critique Church doctrine.

June 25, 2026 issue

Magda Teter

A Different Country Came to Them

Until Greece annexed Salonica in 1912, it had long been a city where “all peoples” used to pass. How did its Jews come to be eliminated and their history erased?

June 25, 2026 issue

Adam Hochschild

A Dream of a Socialist Commonwealth

Molly Crabapple’s history of the Bund recovers an egalitarian, secular, cosmopolitan vision of Jewish identity and political life that was lost in the horrors of the twentieth century.

May 28, 2026 issue

Brenda Wineapple

World of His Fathers

Nicholas Lemann’s Returning traces his Louisiana family’s gradual distancing across generations from its Jewish faith and his own efforts to reembrace it.

April 23, 2026 issue

Forbidden Fruit

Lauren Kane

Indecorous Decorations

Medieval ideas about sex and love, both rowdy and reverent, are recorded on objects meant for everyday use.

March 28, 2026

Erin Maglaque

Vexed by Sex

A new history of how Christianity has met the problem of desire argues for more flexibility in proclamations on gender and sexuality.

April 24, 2025 issue

Miri Rubin

Christian Hair

The historical claim that Christianity replaced Judaism as a superior faith resulted in laws and language that persecuted Jews—and laid a foundation for white supremacy, too, a new book argues.

April 10, 2025 issue

Elizabeth Bruenig

Jesus, Mary, and Mary

If the Church and world persist for another two thousand years, the subject of Mary’s virginity will still be maddeningly controversial.

November 21, 2019 issue

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

Hannah Arendt

A selection of Hannah Arendt’s contributions to the New York Review. Read all of her essays here.

Hannah Arendt

Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address

June 26, 1975 issue

Hannah Arendt

Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers

November 18, 1971 issue

Hannah Arendt

A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

February 27, 1969 issue

Hannah Arendt, translated from the German by Albert Hofstadter

Martin Heidegger at Eighty

October 21, 1971 issue

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt: An Interview

October 26, 1978 issue

Hannah Arendt

A Heroine of Revolution

October 6, 1966 issue

The Latest

Marina Garcés, Mohsin Hamid, Nesrine Malik, and Ece Temelkuran, introduction by Thomas Banchoff and Pankaj Mishra

The Cruel and the Frail

Reflections on weakness, violence, and solidarity from the third installment of the Georgetown Global Dialogues

August 27, 2026

Mark O’Connell

Space Oddity

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism examines how Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, by selling a vision of the future that very few people would want to inhabit.

July 23, 2026 issue

Meghan O’Gieblyn

‘We Did Our Best!’

Metaphors of parenting have defined our understanding of AI, but lately the parent-child relationship between creator and machine is becoming reversed.

June 25, 2026 issue

Zadie Smith

Art for Our Sakes

Why should we go on making things?

June 11, 2026 issue

M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin

Not in Your Genome

Generations of “sociobiologists” have tried and failed to argue that genetic analysis offers the key to understanding social inequality. A new book fares no better.

June 11, 2026 issue

Christopher Benfey

A Clearing of the Ground

Hampshire College, 1970–2026

April 19, 2026

Robert Pogue Harrison

Interminable Ignorance

Why has the will to ignorance become so virulent in our time?

April 9, 2026 issue

Dan Rockmore

In Defense of Algebra

The mathematician Paul Lockhart believes to his core that math is the purest of the arts, and anyone can learn to love it.

April 9, 2026 issue

Erin Maglaque

God’s Impertinent Prophets

A new history brings to light the dissenting women who wrote, preached, and testified during England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, claiming the standing to speak as excluded outsiders who had an unfiltered knowledge of God.

March 26, 2026 issue

Magda Teter

‘An Entirely New Domain of Knowledge’

The Torah scholars who came to be called “rabbis” emerged as figures of authority after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE and the later exile of Jews from Judaea—and created Judaism’s founding literature.

March 12, 2026 issue