Kwame Anthony Appiah

Anyone Can Whistle

“I’m drawn to the idea that ethics is as much about describing who we are as prescribing what we should do.”

The Limits of Free Speech: An Exchange

Watch What You Say

Fara Dabhoiwala considers the right to free speech the con at the heart of the Constitution because of the harms it permits. But what about the harms it prevents?

Translation’s Drift

Two books look closely at both the limitations and the possibilities of the art of literary translation.

Symphilosophizing in Jena

The intellectual achievements of the early German Romantics were inseparable from their friendships and feuds.

Liberation Psychology

How Frantz Fanon came to view violence as therapy.

The Roots of Inequality: An Exchange

Digging for Utopia

In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow search for historical examples of nonhierarchical societies to justify their anarchist vision of human freedom. But must we find our future in the past?

The Prophet of Maximum Productivity

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.

The Defender of Differences

On Franz Boas and his critics

The Key to All Mythologies

Herder in the Balance

Voltaire’s Tears

Dialectics of Enlightenment

‘Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason’ by Justin E.H. Smith

An Open Letter to Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, and Donald Tusk, President of the European Council

The Red Baron

On Michael Young and the ideal of meritocracy

Surreal Anthropology

The Achievement of Achebe

The genius of Chinua Achebe, like all genius, escapes precise analysis. The first of the novels in his “African trilogy” defined a starting point for the modern African novel.

Turkey’s Attack on Teachers

Murder in Mexico: An Open Letter