Nation Topics - Books and Ideas | The Nation

Nikolai Leskov’s The Enchanted Wandered and Other Stories; Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself

A history of how risk management profits from manufacturing new forms of uncertainty and insecurity.

How did everything a writer had known and loved come violently apart?

FDR, Fiorello La Guardia and rebuilding New York City during the New Deal.

No one dies for poetry anymore, not even in Russia. Enter the oligarchs, who steer clear of Putin’s ire by sponsoring literary prizes.

Slut-shaming, name-calling and no respect: welcome to life in literary America for a 21st century female author.

How did a man who got so many things wrong become an intellectual celebrity in his own lifetime?

An unreliable anthropologist of traditional societies is a no less dubious diagnostician of the contemporary world.