The FBI’s first director built the agency around some of his own worst instincts.

For 26 years, Eliot wrote intense, passionate letters to Emily Hale. Should they change the way we read his poetry?

The Passenger is an unusually loose, warm novel—full of theories and anecdotes, memories and stories.

How Americans lost faith in the possibility of self-government

Nikyatu Jusu’s portrait of a nanny’s breakdown fuses horror and social realism.

Gurnah’s haunting novels of war and oppression, which won him the Nobel Prize in literature last year, defy the dominant trends in American publishing.

Longtermists focus on ensuring humanity’s existence into the far future. But not without sacrifices in the present.

At its peak in the eighteenth century, Jena in Germany may have had a higher concentration of geniuses than Renaissance Florence or ancient Athens—and plenty of drama.

Americans may appear to be split along educational lines—but the dysfunction goes much deeper.

The GOP believed it could appeal to its extremist fringe, without succumbing to it.

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

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

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?

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

The United Kingdom has given a range of financial crimes a sheen of respectability.

On loving and loathing some of America’s most common public spaces

His vision of a tech-optimized future inspired a generation. But his true talent was for burnishing his own image.

“Sharp Stick” has all the hallmarks of a Dunham production. That’s the problem.