I recently spent a semester teaching writing at an elite liberal-arts college. At strategic points around the campus, in shades of yellow and green, banners displayed the following pair of texts. The ...

What a sensible idea of Ashbery’s, I thought, and modest—to direct attention away from himself. It also worked to his own benefit; he was more interested in exploring these other poets and ...

From an anonymous message about Rinaldo Nazzaro, the founder of The Base, a white-supremacist group, that circulated on Telegram in April. Unlike what most people and the media think, The ...

In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and ...

Listen to an audio version of this article. O n April 25, the same day that FBI agents arrested a Wisconsin judge and ICE deported a cancer-stricken four-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras, I arrived ...

Techno-thrillers are the rose-colored glasses through which the national-security state sees itself. Ronald Reagan so admired Tom Clancy’s novel The Hunt for Red October (“my kind of yarn”) that he ...

Techno-thrillers are the rose-colored glasses through which the national-security state sees itself. Ronald Reagan so admired Tom Clancy’s novel The Hunt for Red October (“my kind of yarn”) that he ...

From Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency, which will be published this month by Princeton University Press. For nearly a century, presidents were presidents, regardless of party.

Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light (1979) was published in English in 2019, in a superb translation by the late Geraldine Harcourt. Although Harcourt had translated other Tsushima books decades ...

Discussed in this essay: Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine, by Jonathan Haslam. Harvard University Press. 368 pages. $29.95. The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived ...

I did not want my mother. There had been no plans made to have her, no balloons to call attention to the occasion. She was already here before me, fully formed, and on her own, talking in full ...

The Democratic Party has, within a relatively short span, lost its purpose; it has become a defender of the status quo, a role in which it cannot hope to compete with the Republicans. It was President ...