After Babel Fish

Richard Hughes Gibson

More communication is not necessarily better communication.

Digesting Dante

Richard Hughes Gibson

Dante invented not only the epic in his vernacular but also a new reading public for it.

The Word Made Lifeless

Talbot Brewer

The development of AI reads less like a familiar chapter from the history of consumer capitalism and more like the storyboard of a Bond film in which we’ve all been cast as extras.

Untranslated

Olga Litvak

The Jewish suspicion of confession is a kind of epistemological modesty, an unwillingness to examine other minds too closely.

Current Issue Current Issue: Lessons of Babel

Lessons of Babel

On what is lost and gained in translation.


Of Continuing Interest

A selection of articles from the archives

California Road Trip

Matthew B. Crawford

A trip down the California coast has an aspect of memory and return to it.

Preserving the Wilderness Idea

Brian Treanor

Calling the idea of wilderness into question makes as much sense as asking whether the United States is a democracy.

The Return of the King

Philip S. Gorski

We see the peculiar features of neoauthoritarianism as quite real modern-day reincarnations of the ancient tradition of divine kingship.

The New Ruling Class

Helen Andrews

Meritocracy began by destroying an aristocracy; it has ended in creating a new one.