The main purpose of the new Disney+ show is to act as a bridge between one Star Wars series and the next. For the streaming service, that’s all it needs to be.

"The Wife" exposes the inequality in a famous novelist’s marriage.

How the show’s new season skewers the book world

How Leslie Jamison rejected the link between creativity and alcoholism

The partisan world of Pablo Neruda

Long a silent presence in American life, class is now sharply felt in upheavals and displacement across the country.

Zora Neale Hurston’s drive to tell the story of the slave trade’s last survivor

On AMC, ‘Dietland’ serves up a revenge fantasy for the era of MeToo.

Why are schools still judged by the results of standardized tests?

How the ideal of a radically equal republic faded after the Civil War

The violent visions of Michael Haneke

Errol Morris searches for a link between a mourning son, the CIA, and LSD.

The idea that one man brought about the Protestant Reformation obscures a much longer history of dissent.

Elizabeth Hardwick’s argumentative life among the New York Intellectuals

The troubled rise of the technocrat

How Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier vision of freedom and survival lives on in Trump’s America.

How "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" completes the Greek director's descent into self-parody

Why Margaret Atwood’s “Alias Grace” makes subversive television.

What made prehistoric hunter-gatherers give up freedom for civilization?

How the contest between capitalism and communism shaped world politics—and defines today’s inequalities.