On minor characters and human possibility ...

From Mysticism, which was published last month by New York Review Books. “Mysticism” is the word for what we modern, critical philosophers are meant to distrust in the name of enlightenment. It is all ...

From Mourning a Breast, which was published in July by New York Review Books. Translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley. Every fall, my friends and I get together to admire the lanterns of the ...

This month’s Letters section is devoted to remembrances of Lewis H. Lapham (1935–2024), the editor of Harper’s Magazine from 1976 to 1981 and from 1983 to 2006. I first worked for Lewis just out of ...

He took George Washington’s and John Quincy Adams’s anti-imperialist admonitions to heart; he spoke passionately about the ...

In the summer of 2023, California legislators approved a bill banning discrimination on the grounds of caste. Defined in the bill as “an individual’s perceived position in a system of social ...

Does anyone believe in college education anymore? Republicans certainly don’t—a mere 19 percent of them expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education in a Gallup poll ...

Before going up Millstone Hill the crowd waited in a field for darkness to fall. As the long summer day trailed on, they twirled colored ribbons and tossed devil sticks in the air, a jam band played, ...

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Donald Trump calls for a ban on Muslims entering the United States; Dorothy Thompson wonders who is most susceptible to Nazism.