Ideas

Philosophy & Religion

God of the Gaps

Ross Douthat’s usual contrarian approach, in his recent book Believe, leads to a curiously impotent, watered-down account of religious experience.

January 15, 2026 issue

Ben Tarnoff

People Think

Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free.

February 26, 2026 issue

Magda Teter

‘An Entirely New Domain of Knowledge’

The Torah scholars who came to be called “rabbis” emerged as figures of authority after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE and the later exile of Jews from Judaea—and created Judaism’s founding literature.

March 12, 2026 issue

Adam Kirsch

The Apolitical Life

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben exalts an ideal of what he calls “inoperativity”—a kind of passivity as an antidote to the West’s politics of power and domination.

December 4, 2025 issue

Diarmaid MacCulloch

An Outsider from the Beginning

Sifting the contradictions of the Bible can bring Jesus and Mary into sharper focus and illuminate their surprisingly human features.

December 18, 2025 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Can the Church Evolve?

The big question for Pope Leo XIV is whether he will complete Pope Francis’s mission to make the Catholic Church less tyrannical.

June 12, 2025 issue

Sally Rooney

Angles of Approach

Ronnie O’Sullivan is the greatest snooker player in history—what he can do, no one has ever been able to do. And no one can even explain how he does it.

March 27, 2025 issue

Anne Diebel

A Woman’s Burden

Freezing eggs has been marketed as a panacea for ambitious professional women supposedly hungry for more time to focus on their careers, when in reality it’s often a last resort for women negotiating a mating crisis.

November 20, 2025 issue

It’s All in Your Head

Gavin Francis

The Dream of Forgetfulness

Two recent books build on an insight of Borges—that to live, it is necessary to forget.

March 9, 2023 issue

Alec Wilkinson

Illuminating the Brain’s ‘Utter Darkness’

A new biography considers the peculiar life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose discovery that nerve cells are individual completely overthrew the existing theory of the brain.

February 9, 2023 issue

John Gray

The Mind’s Body Problem

The belief that we’re different from other organisms may be an incurable human illusion.

December 2, 2021 issue

Gregory Hays

A Mind in Pain

For Robert Burton, describing melancholy was a way of describing the world. Two recent books on depression suggest that today, virtually all we know about the subject is still open to debate.

October 21, 2021 issue

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

Hannah Arendt

A selection of Hannah Arendt's contributions to the New York Review. Read all of her essays here.

Hannah Arendt

Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address

June 26, 1975 issue

Hannah Arendt

Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers

November 18, 1971 issue

Hannah Arendt

A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

February 27, 1969 issue

Hannah Arendt, translated from the German by Albert Hofstadter

Martin Heidegger at Eighty

October 21, 1971 issue

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt: An Interview

October 26, 1978 issue

Hannah Arendt

A Heroine of Revolution

October 6, 1966 issue

The Latest

Robert Pogue Harrison

Interminable Ignorance

Why has the will to ignorance become so virulent in our time?

April 9, 2026 issue

Dan Rockmore

In Defense of Algebra

The mathematician Paul Lockhart believes to his core that math is the purest of the arts, and anyone can learn to love it.

April 9, 2026 issue

Erin Maglaque

God’s Impertinent Prophets

A new history brings to light the dissenting women who wrote, preached, and testified during England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, claiming the standing to speak as excluded outsiders who had un unfiltered knowledge of God.

March 26, 2026 issue

Willa Glickman

Life Storage

Protecting graves in New York City has never been easy.

January 18, 2026

Zadie Smith, Tash Aw, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez

The Solidarity of the Hopeful

Reflections on literature, politics, and religion from the second installment of the Georgetown Global Dialogues

October 31, 2025

Peter E. Gordon

Secular Priests

In its efforts to define religion, modern sociology has also sought to define itself.

November 6, 2025 issue

Josephine Quinn

‘Insider and Outsider’

How did Saint Augustine’s African origins and his life among Christians there shape his theology?

November 6, 2025 issue

Nitin K. Ahuja

Looking Behind the Veil

Can the tools of science be used to investigate the mysteries of death?

November 6, 2025 issue

David A. Bell

A Baleful Legacy

Enlightenment writers who proposed ways of improving and even perfecting the human species laid the theoretical foundations of modern racism.

November 6, 2025 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

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?

September 25, 2025 issue