The White Whale
E.L. Doctorow : George W. Bush Administration
Just as Moby-Dick was too much for Ahab, our new century may be too difficult for us to comprehend.
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Good Faith
Daniel Lazare : Religion
Two authors posit very different views on the problem of religious conflict in a supposedly secular age.
2007
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Spirited Away
Two writers explore the perversion of our collective imagination and the ways that science and myth shape our understanding of spirituality.
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The Thought Experimenter
Jackson Lears : Public Figures & Intellectuals
A new biography of William James portrays a man who made a brilliant career of asking tough questions.
2006
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A Metaphysical Materialist
Philosopher Walter Benjamin married Marxism and theology in an attempt to give hope to the hopeless.
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The Prison Notebooks
Nikolai Bukharin's Philosophical Arabesques is more than a cul-de-sac on the road from Marx to Stalin; the book defines a political path still not taken.
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Keeping It Real
Jackson Lears : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
In Songs of Experience, Martin Jay examines modern debates over the relationship between theory and the lived world.
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Heidegger Made Kosher
Two new books explore the work of philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger.
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In Her Mind's Eye
Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is a political classic trapped in the era in which it was written.
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Easier Said Than Done
John Gray : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism explores the middle ground between the universal laws of liberalism and relativism's blind respect for all differences.
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Harry Magdoff
The late socialist economist Harry Magdoff read Marx at fifteen and never looked back. A self-educated co-editor of the Monthly Review, he not only fought for a just and humane world; he embodied his politics in the way he conducted his life.
2005
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Marxism and Form
Stefan Collini : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
Perry Anderson's Spectrum journeys through the abstract worlds of conservative and liberal intellectual thought, and leaves in its trail insights on the substance and style of ideas.
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Profane Illuminations
New biographies of Rousseau and Voltaire help us appreciate how very fragile the eighteenth century's great movement of ideas was, and how remarkable it is that the Enlightenment not only survived but flourished.
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The Philosophy of Art
Arthur Danto talks about art in America, the rise of pluralism and how The Nation changed his life.
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The Treason of the Clerics
Jonathan Rée : Islam & Muslims
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution details the story of Foucault's induction into journalism as a political correspondent in Iran.
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Hail Mary
Vivian Gornick : Feminism & Women
A new biography of one of the Enlightment's most remarkable thinkers.
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Epistemology of the Closet
Martha Nussbaum : Sex & Sexuality
A biography of Utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick sheds new light on life in the Victorian era.
2004
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Philosophical Convictions
Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister.
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The Moral Case Against the Iraq War
Paul Savoy : George W. Bush Administration
The crimes at Abu Ghraib are a direct expression of the kind of war we are waging in Iraq.
2001
2000
This week: A look at the advocacy group MoveOn.org at 10. Plus: Controversy in Africa over the indictment of the Sudanese President; Amy Alexander and Chris Rabb on the challenges facing minority journalists in their transition to the web; and The Nation's new sex column. (13mb mp3)
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