An essay marks the 50th anniversary of Hermann Levin Goldschmidt’s Freiheit für den Widerspruch, using a Grimms’ tale to illustrate his dialogic approach to contradiction. It describes a Berlin cemetery’s community gardens and a medical emergency during a Zurich concert.
The essay recounts John Adams and Thomas Jefferson leaving the presidency and later exchanging 158 letters, then focuses on Jefferson’s October 28, 1813 reply about natural and artificial aristocracy. It presents their correspondence as a substantive source for debates over government and political selection.
Ken Burns writes in The New York Times that the United States confronts a fourth great crisis as voters cast midterm ballots, following the Civil War and the Depression and World War II. He attributes it to misinformation he says the current administration encourages, leaving elections doubted, the top court seemingly compromised and democratic guardrails strained.
The essay calls 'civic grief' the mourning when faith in fellow citizens and democratic norms erodes, describing denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance as responses. It cites Freedom House's 2026 report finding global freedom declined for a 20th straight year in 2025, worsening in 54 countries and improving in 35.
Two philosophers argue that what distinguishes religious belief is not its content but the attitude involved: religious credence is voluntarily adopted and largely resistant to evidence, unlike involuntary, evidence-driven factual belief. They contend this psychological contrast helps justify Jefferson's separation of church and state.
Schneider K. Rancy explains how Derek Walcott’s Omeros changed his view of classical epics and encouraged him to write a novel shaped by his Haitian immigrant background and Caribbean homeland.
In an interview, Mary Beth Keane discusses Whale Harbor, her fifth novel, tracing an Irish family that migrates to England, Montana and New York. She explains how her father’s family history inspired the book while the novel remains fiction.
The essay reviews NAZA, a documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor in which 24 current and former Israeli military intelligence members describe civilian deaths in Gaza. It weighs the film’s account of the killing system against the ethics of shielding the interviewees’ identities.
D.J. Taylor’s book excerpt examines how J.R.R. Tolkien’s Catholic faith shaped his fiction and personal choices. Tolkien described The Lord of the Rings as a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, with belief absorbed into its story and symbolism rather than stated outright.
Edward Abel Smith recounts corresponding with and visiting Robin Garbutt at Wealstun Prison, where Garbutt is serving a life sentence for murdering his wife Diana at their North Yorkshire post office in 2010. Garbutt's supporters maintain his innocence, and Smith describes reviewing case documents while weighing how the convicted man presented himself.
Camillo Sitte's 1889 book The Art of Building Cities argued that enclosed, modestly sized public spaces with irregular layouts made urban places feel intimate, and his ideas shaped planning before modernist grids displaced them.
By late November 1941, Edward Hopper had started Nighthawks and decided its dimensions, with many preparatory sketches already likely done. He sketched coffee urns and diner items at the Dixie Kitchen in Midtown, and used himself and Jo as models for the painting’s figures.
Jessica Riskin recounts how Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's 1809 Philosophie zoologique proposed that all living things continually transform, with organisms' ways of life shaping their bodily forms. Riskin notes that Lamarck is often remembered through the giraffe example, which is treated as proof of his broader error.
A first-person diary follows Serbia’s October 25, 2026 parliamentary election, when record early turnout and reports of irregularities gave way to Student List’s victory over Aleksandar Vučić’s SNS. The account describes diaspora voting limits, a tense Belgrade, and Vučić’s concession.
DeepMind Institute researchers propose defining AGI through economic capability thresholds, then tracing how market structure, employment and wages shift across capability regimes. They note rapid machine-intelligence gains alongside little visible change in aggregate productivity and most employment patterns.
Jessica Lucas reports for Intelligencer on adult children who quietly curate their elderly parents' social media feeds, blocking conspiracy channels and nudging algorithms toward safer content. One Virginia man keeps resetting his 81-year-old mother's accounts after frightening videos left her afraid to leave home.
An essay argues that psychology's influential 'empty self' metaphor, which casts behaviour as driven by fleeting situational cues, has been weakened by the replication crisis. The authors contend that personality traits and an enduring self predict behaviour about as strongly as situations do.
Marie Snyder reviews Alexander Douglas’s Against Identity, which draws on Zhuangzi, Spinoza and Girard to argue against a fixed, self-invented identity. She outlines how imitation and borrowed models shape desire, and suggests accepting a fluid self may reduce rivalry.
The essay traces Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's 1809 theory that living things drive their own changes and shape their surroundings, an idea ridiculed for two centuries yet influential on Darwin. It notes that some modern biologists are returning to Lamarck's emphasis on organisms' creative role in evolution.
An interview with Karina M. Szczurek and authors Dilman Dila, Sven Axelrad and Faraaz Mahomed explores how ghosts, spirits and magical realism shape contemporary African fiction and its treatment of memory, identity and history.
