Nation Topics - | The Nation

To see humanitarianism everywhere is not to see it at all.

Is Deng Xiaoping’s legacy of modernization without political reform one that no contemporary Chinese official can control?

In Mañana Forever? Jorge Castañeda chronicles the growth of the middle class to argue that Mexico is not a failed state.

Janet Malcolm can be brutal in her judgments, but it is the casual brutality of keen observation.

The Social Animal is a deep and public embarrassment, a lumpy hybrid of fable, neuroscience and social engineering.

John Kenneth Galbraith was a satirist of economics as much as a practitioner of it.

Elizabeth Bishop's Poems and Prose; James Gleick's The Information.

With a sharp eye for cultural patterns and a keen feel for the shape of a story, Claude Lévi-Strauss was a poet in the laboratory of anthropology.

Like Siberia itself, Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia seems simply to drift off into the distance.

Habeas corpus rescued Walter Rideau from an unjust prison sentence, but during its long history the great writ has been used to muffle the sighs of prisoners as much as to relieve them.