Credit Artwork by Stephen Doyle Skip to contentSkip to site index Feature A historian of conservatism looks back at how he and his peers failed to anticipate the rise of the president. Credit Artwork by Stephen Doyle U ntil Nov. 8, 2016, historians of American politics shared a rough consensus about…

Imagine, if you will, this scene. The university’s annual symposium has begun, an event that promises to advance the mission of the institution by tackling subjects of depth and complexity in the human condition. This year’s theme is “Remembering the Shoah: Saying ‘Never Again’ to Genocide,”…

Fisun Güner 19 March 2014 1:08 PM 19 March 2014 1:08 PM Share It’s become too easy of late to be rude about Alain de Botton. His banal aphoristic “insights” and homilies on Twitter, his efforts to turn the media away from “meanness” (news should provide moral uplift and teach us how to be better…

We might take the demonstrative demise of strongmen such as Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and – more recently and unobtrusively – Fidel Castro in Cuba to indicate that the day of the dictator has largely passed. Alas, authoritarianism is staging a comeback. Yet it is clear to…

Authority First: The Enclave Strikes Back “I sat in the waiting room wasting my time, and waiting for Judgment Day. I praise liberty, the freedom to obey.” – Green Day, “21st Century Breakdown,” 21st Century Breakdown (2009) Fundamentalists force an inhumane choice on reflective, empathetic…

Sarah Kendzior is a St. Louis, Mo.-based commentator who writes about politics, the economy and media. On Feb. 27, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, claimed that Americans protesting the administration of Donald Trump are being paid $1,500 (U.S.) a week,…

The D.N.C. hacks, many analysts believe, were just a skirmish in a larger war against Western institutions and alliances. Illustration by Christoph Niemann 1. Soft Targets On April 12, 1982, Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the K.G.B., ordered foreign-intelligence operatives to carry out “active…

Once they were redefined as mathematical objects, it became possible to ask all sorts of interesting questions about the properties of symplectic manifolds and, in particular, the dynamics of Hamiltonian vector fields. For example, imagine a particle (or planet) that flows along the vector field and…

My fellow Americans, I have a favor to ask you. Today is November 18, 2016. I want you to write about who you are, what you have experienced, and what you have endured. Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others. Write about your dreams for the future and your…

Inequality: What Can Be Done? by Anthony B. Atkinson Toward a New Radical Reformism Anthony Atkinson occupies a unique place among economists. During the past half-century, in defiance of prevailing trends, he managed to place the question of inequality at the center of his work while demonstrating…

LYNCHBURG, VA – JANUARY 18: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers the convocation at the Vines Center on the campus of Liberty University January 18, 2016 in Lynchburg, Virginia. A billionaire real estate mogul and reality television personality, Trump addressed students and guests…

Advent is the time to open the first pages of the Church’s story of salvation. It is an enchanted portal into a world of darkness, deep mystery and the Spirit’s hidden brooding. Advent asks us to sit a while in the darkness, waiting for the light of God, but sitting in darkness is difficult for…

With the election of Donald Trump, the latent threat of American authoritarianism—identified decades ago by German intellectuals—is on the verge of being realized. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAMON WINTER / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX Shortly after the Presidential election, a small piece of good news came over…

In the wake of the election, we must resist the slightest extension in the boundaries of what is right and just. PHOTOGRAPH BY LIVIO MANCINI / REDUX America has always been aspirational to me. Even when I chafed at its hypocrisies, it somehow always seemed sure, a nation that knew what it was doing,…

I’m pleased to share a guest post from Laura Cavanaugh of Sacred Pilgrim . I discovered Laura through her daily Lectio Divina podcast. Such a beautiful podcast that I highly recommend to you. The first time I tried centering prayer, I cried. I mean cried. Sobbed, really. I was finishing up my…

Wednesday 19 October 2016 9:42am Share Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher and director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. I am a philosopher who believes that Western philosophy begins not with Plato, but elsewhere, and earlier, with the Book of Job . That is because I believe that the…

Saturday, early October, at a fairground 40 minutes southwest of Milwaukee. The very name of this place, Elkhorn, conjures images of past massacres on now-silent fields across our blood-soaked history. Nobody will die here; this is not Wounded Knee, but it is the end of an era. The modern Republican…

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In the extremities of war, we may know what we’ve been, but not what we will become. “Damage” is a tale of desperate times, desperate measures, and the inner life of a fighter spacecraft. This short story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by Senior Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. I never had a…

Rev. William Barber is reviving the civil rights movement—one Monday at a time. These days Barber is looking to the next stage: Figuring out how to keep the pressure on at the statehouse, balance the national spotlight and his grassroots efforts, and how to help others who want to replicate his…

H ell, yes, it was crazy. You rubbed your eyes at the sight of it, as in, “Did that really just happen?” It wasn’t what we expected. We thought Donald Trump ’s version of the Republican National Convention would be a brilliantly bawdy exercise in Nazistic excess. We expected thousand-foot light…

She was all over our screens one minute and gone the next. In 2007, aged 15, she fled Somalia after a rocket attack in the civil war between the government and the Islamic terrorist group al-Shabaab hit her home and killed her family. She arrived on Christmas Island in October 2013 and was sent to…

You can fix your "um" and you probably should. Each of us now owns a media channel and a brand, and sooner or later, as your work gains traction, we'll hear your voice. Either in a job interview or on a podcast or in a video. For a million years, people have been judging each other based on voice.…

The Charm of Beauty In an Ugly Age Brian Zahnd “It is the prerogative and charm of beauty to win hearts.” –Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote It’s an ugly time right now. Especially in the public discourse in the land in which I live. Politicized and polarized, public discourse has devolved into the…

Authoritarians get into power by understanding the mass psychology of perceived authority/legitimacy. They know it’s a cultural coordination game and that all the other stuff—positions on issues, etc. —only matters insofar as it’s instrumental to getting people to reject rivals and rally to your…

Illustration by Tom Bachtell The American Presidency has developed an unfortunate resemblance not so much to an imperial throne, as some insist, as to the medieval papacy, with an obsessive pomposity of office producing all those hangar-size libraries and bricklike memoirs. We talk solemnly about…

A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall…

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not…

I ndianapolis, Indiana, May 3rd, 2016, a little before 8:30 p.m. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz strode onstage beneath a gorgeous stained-glass relief in the city’s Union Station. The hall was doubling as a swanky bar for an upscale local hotel, and much of the assembled press was both lubricated and…

Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, in his office. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Feature How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age. Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, in his office. Credit…

A talk given at the ebookcraft conference, March 30, 2016 A lot of what we’ve talked about today, and a lot of what we talk about at digital publishing conferences generally, assumes that all we do is make brand new ebooks, usually to go along with brand new print books. And so we have sessions on…

Like most writers, I am an inveterate procrastinator. In the course of writing this one article, I have checked my e-mail approximately 3,000 times, made and discarded multiple grocery lists, conducted a lengthy Twitter battle over whether the gold standard is actually the worst economic policy ever…

There are some important dos and don’ts to bear in mind when choosing someone to oversee your doctoral thesis, advises Tara Brabazon July 11, 2013 My father used to tell a joke, over and over again. It was a classic outback Australian, Slim Dusty joke that – like the best dad jokes – I can’t…

What do you think of when you think of a female monster? “I also had pleasant day. I went working and shopping," Helena says to an imaginary companion across the table, midway through season one of BBC America’s Orphan Black . She’s alone in the kitchen eating contraband chicken. The effect is…