In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and ...

The case against a venerable pregnancy treatmentA fter just a couple of days on bed rest, the material of your body begins to feel different: softer, heavier, a burden to the bone beneath. The thud of ...

I n the mid-Nineties, I spent about eighteen months working as an editor for the British edition of a new magazine called Wired, which had been founded in San Francisco as a sort of house journal of ...

What a sensible idea of Ashbery’s, I thought, and modest—to direct attention away from himself. It also worked to his own benefit; he was more interested in exploring these other poets and ...

F lash forward to the present day, as the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, “content.” As recently as fifteen years ago ...

Discussed in this essay: On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger, translated from the German by Tess Lewis. New York Review Books. 144 pages. $14.95. E rnst Jünger is the intractable land mine of German ...

How coaches get in athletes’ headsA t the 2003 World Figure Skating Championships, Tim Goebel stood by the ice just before his long program. At the time, people called him the Quad King. In figure ...

Five months after Donald Trump moved into the White House in 2017, a reporter asked Vladimir Putin about the allegations that Russia had interfered in U.S. elections. After all, Trump had proclaimed ...

W hen I pulled the used copy of Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes out of its white plastic mailer it felt oddly light for a book of its girth, its center of gravity not exactly ...

The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, by Jon Meacham. Random House. 416 pages. $20. The Soul of America, directed by KD Davison. HBO, 2020. 77 minutes. It’s the beginning of the new ...

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages. $39.95. Our doomed thought ...

Lonsan had come to Japan from Thailand in 1995, after a chatty recruiter showed up in her village and offered her a job at a restaurant. She was living with her parents, who had no money or property, ...