In Ruben Östlund’s satire, the amusements of the moneyed elite belie a foundation of violence, cowardice, and shame.

People want the most prestigious award for literature to make a political statement. It complies only in unpredictable and inscrutable ways.

States were meant to be “laboratories of democracy.” Instead, they are pioneering new ways to restrict voting and distort representation.

If Haruki Murakami wins, I will eat one of his fancy T-shirts.

When Elaine Showalter met the author in 2000, she was on the verge of an intellectual breakthrough.

In the wake of economic crises, liberal democracies proved most adept at imposing austerity.

Jeremiah Moss writes of the early days of the pandemic as a glimpse of the city before gentrification.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown just how hard it is for Americans to grieve.

An industry insider’s sympathetic account is unintentionally revealing of private equity’s worst features.

The law firm Jones Day was crucial to Trump’s presidency. How much responsibility does the firm bear for his legacy?

How much complexity is lost in a sentence no longer than six words?

The twentieth century promised prosperity and leisure for all. What went wrong?

Recent critiques of “presentism” fail to see that we can’t divorce the past from the present—and that supposedly objective scholarship has long promoted racist narratives and suppressed Black history.

A handful of companies control the web. It doesn’t have to be that way.

In Amazon’s take on The Lord of the Rings, the hero is a fanatic, ceaselessly seeking out potential threats.

Steven Thrasher’s new book examines how society makes people vulnerable to viruses and blames them for it.

Sorokin’s novels do not “say” anything about Russia today.

Danger surrounded Freud in Nazi-occupied Austria. Why did it take him so long to see it?

The internet demands that women project desirability—at a level formerly reserved for movie stars.

Felix Frankfurter warned that politicians, not the courts, should make policy.