The Humor Is Almost Lost on Us
Martha Bayles
Instead of satire, which aims at improvement, we have snark.
History Bedeviled
Paul Nedelisky
Were the signs and wonders of the early modern mystics divine or diabolical?
Left Behind
John M. Owen IV
An argument that the formidable strength of right-populism in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism in 1989 is more a product of economics than of culture.
All the Little Data
Nicholas Carr
When we communicate using little data, we’re speaking the language of robots.
Current Issue
Of Continuing Interest
A selection of articles from the archives
A Usable Past for a Post-American Nation
Johann N. Neem
We are living through a time, however, when we cannot take our shared identity—and therefore our shared stories—for granted.
Remembering Henry Pleasants
Martha Bayles
What Pleasants found in the Afro-American idiom was a body of music intended to comfort the afflicted.
Democratic Authority at Century’s End
Jean Bethke Elshtain
The democratic story added the following to the idea of civic order: Through pledges and promises—a social contract or covenant—persons throw in their fortunes with one another. They seek not a perfect world, but a better one. And authority is necessary to its realization.
Gnosticism in Modernity, or Why History Refuses to End
Isaac Ariail Reed and Michael Weinman
Contending with a radical distrust of the created world.