The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add ...

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 ...

But by the spring of 2011, he had a feeling that there was a new underappreciated risk: the debt of the federal government ...

Frazer’s understanding of history was largely progressive. He believed that primitive magic gave way to religion, religion to science, and that this sequence moved generally from the more false to 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 ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

A Hitch in Time: Writings from the London Review of Books, by Christopher Hitchens. Atlantic Books. 340 pages. £12.99. His head was hairless, except for a wispy pair of eyebrows, and there was a ...

Why America’s national parks need new managementI n 2016, the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) conducted a survey to determine which parks had produced general ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

The changing face of Appalachia—and its role in the presidential race ...

Discussed in this essay: All Desire Is a Desire for Being, by René Girard. Edited with an introduction by Cynthia L. Haven. Penguin Classics. 317 pages. £12.99. O n November 8, 1519, the first ...

I n the mid-Nineties, I spent about eighteen months working as an editor for the British edition of a new magazine called Wired, which had been founded in San Francisco as a sort of house journal of ...