Advertisements Laurie Penny | Longreads | July 2018 | 20 minutes (5,191 words) “Incredible! One of the worst performances of my career, and they never doubted it for a second!” – Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off “Now that’s a scientific fact. There’s no real evidence for it, but it is…

News Opinion Culture Life Sport Food Quiz The Briefing Past Editions SubscribeLogin Edition No. 218 August 18 – 24, 2018 News Opinion Culture Life Food Quiz Sport The Briefing Past Editions Edition No. 218 August 18 – 24, 2018 Opinion Ruby Hamad Fraser Anning and racist politics Oh, but doesn’t…

Babies in cages were no ‘mistake’ by Trump but test-marketing for barbarism Tue, Jun 26, 2018, 05:00 Fintan O'Toole Video Player is loading. Current Time 0:00 / Duration 2:01 Loaded : 0% Progress : 0% Stream Type LIVE Remaining Time -2:01 1x Chapters descriptions off , selected captions off ,…

[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to be explaining and rewording things I have heard from a bunch of other people. Unapologetically America-centric because I’m not…

Oh, the Humanities! New data on college majors confirms an old trend. Technocracy is crushing the life out of humanism. Opinion Columnist W.H. Auden. Credit Erich Auerbach/Getty Images In the spring of 1946, W.H. Auden came to Harvard to read a poem to the university’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Titled…

Share Facebook email I f I seem to take N.T. Wright as an antagonist in what follows, he functions here only as emblematic of a larger historical tendency in New Testament scholarship. I can think of no other popular writer on the early church these days whose picture of Judaism in the Roman…

How fundamentally difficult is a problem? That’s the basic task of computer scientists who hope to sort problems into what are called complexity classes. These are groups that contain all the computational problems that require less than some fixed amount of a computational resource — something like…

Mike McQuade Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. This past October , I taught a weeklong seminar on the history of conservatism to honors students from around the state of Oklahoma. In five long days, my nine very engaged students and I got to know each other fairly…

T imothy Snyder has taken a region that resists understanding and made it irresistibly interesting. The region is Eastern Europe, a boundless area that Snyder bounds as his stories require—for example, in his influential Bloodlands (2010), where the action extends as far as Nazi and Soviet killing…

This is an expanded version of Timothy Snyder’s essay “ God Is a Russian ” in the April 5, 2018 issue of The New York Review . Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images Ivan Ilyin, circa 1920 “The fact of the matter is that fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness.” —Ivan Ilyin,…

I drive food delivery for an online app to make rent and support myself and my young family. This is my new life. I once had a well paid job in what might be described as the social justice industry. Then I upset the wrong person, and within a short window of time, I was considered too toxic for my…

On June 14, 2016, the Washington Post reported that Russian hackers had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s files and gained access to its research on Donald Trump. A political world already numbed by Trump’s astonishing rise barely took notice. News reports quoted experts who suggested…

2220 words National Affairs The rise and fall of Western civilisation Frank Bongiorno 26 June 2018 Did the Ramsay Centre throw away its best chance by pushing ANU too far? Right: As safe as ever: Winston Churchill watching over University House at ANU. Graham Crumb/Imagicity.com As safe as ever:…

Jonathan Tran on James K. A. Smith’s Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology. James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology. Baker Publishing Group, 2017, 256pp., $23 T he Trump presidency provides a kind of Rorschach test for American Christians, raising the question: what…

Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the truth anymore, as some…

Radicals have a habit of speaking in the conditional. Underlying all their talk about the changes they’d like to see in the world is the uneasy knowledge that our social system places rigid limits on how much change can be accomplished now. “After the revolution . . .” is the wistful, ironic preface…

Tricky. South Vietnam’s President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu meeting President Richard Nixon on 2 April 1973. Flickr/AP Imagine you have been asked to review the reference letters provided by the candidates for a lectureship in philosophy. One reads: ‘My former student, Dr Jack Smith, is polite, punctual and…

The following essay was originally given as a lecture at the Sylvia Beach Hotel as part of our 2018 Poetry Winter Workshop. The alternate title of this, of course, is how the fuck do we write now. Just as the customary greeting of hello has been replaced with what the fuck is going on , and you grab…

May 2018 The Courts by The court networkers Volunteers make visiting courtrooms less of a trial I couldn’t work out who they were, but on days when none of them passed, I missed them: quiet middle-aged women who moved with a light tread along the corridor of the Supreme Court of Victoria, where I…

This week, the Cut brings you True Romance: five days of stories about love as it’s actually lived. I’m an advice columnist, so sometimes people ask me about how they can “keep the romance alive” in their marriages. This stumps me a little because, by “romance,” I know they mean the traditional…

Photo credit : Peg Skorpinski Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra of the current era. The phrase is intoned by technologists, academicians, journalists and venture capitalists alike. As with many phrases that cross over from technical academic fields into general circulation, there is…

This essay contains many, many spoilers. Avoid reading if you haven’t yet seen Infinity War, or, honestly, if you’re a tertiary member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe who maybe hasn’t been paying attention. I’m looking at you, Hawkeye. —Ed. The MCU cycle began when Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk…

Glenn Harvey I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…

A California Zephyr train runs between Chicago and San Francisco. Credit: REUTERS/Joshua Lott I didn't go looking for Donald Trump's America, and I didn't find it. And I'm doubtful it exists. But I doubted that President Trump could exist, too, until he did. Back in October, I spent three days and…

Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos The morning after Donald Trump was elected US president, New York, November 9, 2016 There is alive in the land an organized campaign to discredit the American press. This campaign is succeeding. Its roots are long. For decades, the Republican coalition has tried to hang…

Horse racing is something like a religion in Hong Kong, whose citizens bet more than anyone else on Earth. Their cathedral is Happy Valley Racecourse, whose grassy oval track and floodlit stands are ringed at night by one of the sport’s grandest views: neon skyscrapers and neat stacks of high-rises,…

On the days when Bitcoin crashes, a holiday atmosphere takes over in my corners of the internet. People tweet screengrabs of Reddit fights. It’s always good fun to watch strangers grieve as their digital nonsense nickels melt into slag. It’s not that I want Bitcoin holders to suffer, really. As a…

Michaël Foessel: It has become commonplace to link your work to the enterprise that the Frankfurt School initiated in the 1930s: the elaboration of a critical theory of society capable of breathing new life into the project of emancipation in a world shaped by technocapitalism. When you began your…

The raid on the offices of President Trump’s personal lawyer makes clear that Trump’s battle with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is entering its final chapter. Photograph by Yana Paskova / Getty On May 1, 2003, the day President George W. Bush landed on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in front of…

We eat it with our muesli, bake cakes with it, dollop it on pavlovas, use it to dress potato salad, create savoury sauces with it and devour it on its own. There's no denying the versatility of Greek yoghurt, but with so many brands on the market which one should you choose? We review 22 unsweetened…

The bookseller Lam Wing-kee in Hong Kong. Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times As China’s Xi Jinping consolidates power, owners of Hong Kong bookstores trafficking in banned books find themselves playing a very dangerous game. 查看简体中文版 查看繁體中文版 APRIL 3, 2018 W hen the police officer didn’t laugh, Lam…

This Netflix series about child murder and time travel has something far more topical in mind T wo months after its release, Netflix’s German-language series Dark is still something of a mysterious black box. Online communities and tinfoil-hat thinkpieces have tried to account for its obscure…

The Strange New Pathologies of the World’s First Rich Failed State You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse…

During a recent interview, a journalist pulled me up for using the c-word. “ Class ?” she asked with lifted eyebrow. “What do you mean?” I found myself chewing the air a moment. Had I said something foul, something embarrassing to both of us? Discussing two of my fictional characters in terms of the…

Did Athanasius Believe in Penal Substitution? At this juncture, I want to consider specific objections to my understanding of Athanasius. Specifically, I will explore Athanasius’ use of the terms ‘debt’ and ‘satisfaction’ in De Incarnatione 9 and 20. Athanasius says: What do penal substitution…

In 2014 I wrote a provocative theological piece about a view I called "empathic open theism." That post has continued to attract attention and shares on social media. To be clear, empathic open theism is probably heretical. It's sort of a open/process theology mashup. That said, I recently read…

2015 NYC marathon winner Stanley Biwott. Related Stories How Yoga Turns You Superhuman or Just Less Freaked Out About Life Steph Curry Literally Sees the World Differently Than You Do So, this weekend, you’re going to be one of the 50,000 people running the New York City Marathon, the world’s…

Dec 8, 2017 27 Min read time Topics: global dystopias fiction LGBT gender and sexuality Share: Image: Wikimedia “You used terms such as revolutionaries . Comrades . And, most illegally of all: lovers . Unmarried people who fuck each other without the goal of childrening. Well, I was sunk.” A tale of…

The sealing of America’s fiscal fate began in 1974, over cocktails . As afternoon faded to evening on December 4, Dick Cheney and a young economist named Art Laffer shuffled into a booth at the Two Continents restaurant in the iconic Hotel Washington—it had appeared in scenes from the Godfather II…

Georg Pahl / Wikimedia The evocative title of Timothy Snyder’s new book— Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning —is a reference to the fertile soil of Ukraine, where Adolf Hitler hoped to establish lebensraum , or “living space,” for the German race. And yet it could also be seen as an…