Nation Topics - Books and Ideas | The Nation

They call him "the world's most famous bank guard": Christoph Meili, the former night watchman at the Union Bank of Switzerland in Zurich who in 1997 rescued from the shredder documents that desc

A perplexing disconnect from reality haunts the American financial community.

Few Latino writers have challenged homophobia and machismo as fiercely as Jaime Manrique.

Scratch a philosopher, find a reductionist revolutionary.

The estimates of the number of books written about World War I are in the hundreds of thousands.

Has anyone read John Dennis? Irving Babbitt? Gorham Munson? Probably not, though they were considered important critics in their day.

"Austria had many geniuses, and that was probably its undoing."
    --Robert Musil

Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can't go home again. Alix Kates Shulman disagrees.

If Russia is not to dissolve like the Soviet Union or, worse yet, end in a cataclysm like Yugoslavia's, it must negotiate peacefully across a welter of emotional claims to self-determination.

Public scandals are America's favorite parlor sport. Learning about the flaws and misdeeds of the rich and famous seems to satisfy our egalitarian yearnings.