Christopher Caldwell is not a household name. But for the relatively small set of people who care deeply about political writing, he is a... Read More

In all sincerity, I like Americans a lot; I’ve met many lovely people in the United States, and I empathize with the shame many... Read More

Whether or not he was born that way, Ross Douthat is a defeated man. The child of hippie aspiring writers—a father who became an... Read More

PARIS — A letter from Frida Kahlo, signed and twice kissed with red lipstick, fetched just over $8,800. A page of scribbled... Read More

Of the many bleak moments that have lodged in my mind since reading this extraordinary book the most unshakeable is the image of the once... Read More

The new technology of radar quickly became invaluable in World War II, not only for finding enemy aircraft and ships but also for navigating... Read More

Tracy Walder arrived at the University of Southern California in 1996, and rushed Delta Gamma soon after. For the studious yet bubbly... Read More

In the summer of 1917, a group of university students in Munich invited Max Weber to launch a lecture series on “intellectual work as a... Read More

That, famously, was Clemens von Metternich in 1820, conscious as he always was of the times he lived in and of his own place in them. And how... Read More

Spend some time with masters of finance over a few glasses of whiskey and you may detect a curious streak of mysticism running through these... Read More

In a life that stretched from 1911 to 2004, the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz experienced the twin traumas of Poland’s... Read More

Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested, led to a platform, tied to a stake, and blindfolded before a firing squad. As his biographer Joseph Frank... Read More

Why do we believe in monsters? With the giant squid and the crocodile, the answer is obvious. These things may lurk and slither in dark... Read More

There is an ambiguity at the heart of identity politics. The term suggests a politics centered on identity, as opposed to, say, class or... Read More

At the outset of her new book, Boys & Sex, Peggy Orenstein recounts walking down a high-school hallway to meet an 18-year-old named... Read More

A young woman—observant, self-conscious, harboring literary aspirations, though not quite sure where she wants to end up—meets an... Read More

When we think of books and presidents, we tend to think of books about, not by, our commanders in chief. Some books have been influential in... Read More

In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate... Read More

Since President Donald Trump took office, the media have spilled oceans of ink on the conflicts coming from inside his White House. While his... Read More

Hastening through New York sometime in the late 1950s, the Marxist critic Isaac Deutscher was approached by a news-vendor, who pressed a... Read More

That Zionism and the left were once on better terms is by now a familiar story. In the years after the Holocaust, leftists in Europe and the... Read More

Kim Ghattas, a correspondent for the BBC, gave a remarkably frank interview to her home network about her new book, Black Wave, an... Read More

A con man is only as good as his charm. Frank William Abagnale, reincarnated by Leonardo DiCaprio in “Catch Me if You Can,”... Read More

‘This is the West, Sir,’ says a reporter in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the... Read More

On February 9 1944, in the Garden Room at 10 Downing Street, Winston Churchill sat down to luncheon with the day’s guests. Among the... Read More

In the beginning, Republicans stood far to the left of Democrats on most issues. Founded in 1854 as an antislavery political organization,... Read More

How should we think about the good life? A proper understanding of human flourishing needs an account of human nature in its metaphysical... Read More

Many people think consciously about their mortality only once in a blue moon. Maybe if an odd mole appears. Or after a close call in the car.... Read More