Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

As Kennedy Went

Justice Anthony Kennedy often confounded Supreme Court observers with his seemingly unpredictable opinions, but during the years when a majority could be achieved only through some measure of compromise, he wielded enormous power over the Constitution’s contemporary meaning.

March 12, 2026 issue

Christopher Benfey

Road Trippers

In a thirty-three-day ramble along the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers in 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison encountered many of the issues that would end up plaguing the United States.

March 12, 2026 issue

Joshua Hammer

Paths of Resistance

Those who challenged the Nazi regime knew they were almost certainly doomed to failure. What roused them from complacency to defiance?

March 12, 2026 issue

Laurence H. Tribe

Is the Constitution ‘Dead, Dead, Dead’?

The difficulty of amending the Constitution does not mean that it is a flawed and outdated relic of a distant past.

February 12, 2026 issue

Alec Wilkinson

The Wandering Physicist

Luis Alvarez brought a scientific pragmatism to many of the twentieth century’s greatest mysteries, including the secrets of pyramids, the Kennedy assassination, and the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

March 12, 2026 issue

Robert P. Baird

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

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

Trevor Jackson

The Struggle for the Fed

The Fed is under attack. Can it be both protected and held accountable?

February 26, 2026 issue

Fall of Freedom

Ariel Dorfman

The Futility of Censorship

Eric Berkowitz’s Dangerous Ideas focuses on heroes and heroines who refused to allow their freedom of expression to be extinguished.

April 7, 2022 issue

David Cole

Why Free Speech Is Not Enough

In the Trump era, keeping government out of the speech regulation business is likely to be more essential than ever.

March 23, 2017 issue

Charles Rosen

Freedom and Art

“That is the special status of art among all other activities. It is the source of freedom, prevents the wheels of the social machine from locking into paralysis. From our artists and entertainers, we expect originality and resent it when we get it.”

May 10, 2012 issue

Noam Chomsky

Mayday: The Case for Civil Disobedience

“What is important is not whether one who commits civil disobedience thinks that he is right, but rather the harder questions: Is he right? Will the act help to achieve a just end? Would strictly legal means be ineffective?”

June 17, 1971 issue

John R. Searle (1932–2025)

Remembering John R. Searle

A selection of John R. Searle’s contributions to The New York Review. Read all of his essays here.

John R. Searle

Consciousness & the Philosophers

March 6, 1997 issue

John R. Searle

Consciousness: What We Still Don’t Know

January 13, 2005 issue

John R. Searle

End of the Revolution

February 28, 2002 issue

John R. Searle

What Your Computer Can’t Know

October 9, 2014 issue

John R. Searle

Why Should You Believe It?

September 24, 2009 issue

John R. Searle

The Storm Over the University

December 6, 1990 issue

The Latest

Robert Pogue Harrison

Interminable Ignorance

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

April 9, 2026 issue

Joshua Hammer

A Man-Made Disaster

There has never been a moral and historical reckoning with the horrors inflicted by the Allied firebombing of Japan during World War II.

April 9, 2026 issue

David A. Bell

Who Built France?

A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.

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

Jacob Weisberg

Tick, Tick…Boom!

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s history of the 1929 stock market crash reminds us that financial bubbles are inevitable—and that another one may be about to pop.

March 26, 2026 issue

Robert G. Kaiser

Post Mortem

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t.

March 26, 2026 issue

David Cole

Diversity by Other Means

Progressives may have lost the battle for racial affirmative action, but ironically, Supreme Court decisions should allow colleges to give advantage to groups defined by their income, geography, or heritage.

March 26, 2026 issue

Orville Schell

China’s Leader Manqué

Chiang Kai-shek had enormous flaws as a leader, but something was nonetheless lost to China when he and his Republican government were forced into exile on Taiwan.

March 26, 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

Mark Lilla

Clown Show

In every era a certain kind of unprincipled demagogue driven by an insatiable need for attention and a sense of what will capture the public’s imagination rises to the fore. In the early years of France’s Third Republic, it was the ludicrous Marquis de Morès.

March 26, 2026 issue