Jay Tolson is editor of The Hedgehog Review and a senior fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
At the bottom of each of our system dysfunctions is a distinctive cultural disorder emerging from the many pressures of our rapidly modernizing world.
Travelers today typically seek meaning and purpose in their voyaging—but not always for the same reasons.
It is the deficit of character that motivates the thematic focus of this issue of The Hedgehog Review.
Kafka waited in stillness and solitude for the right words to call forth “the glory of life.”
How, then, do we think beyond what has come to be the tyranny of economics—or perhaps more accurately, how do we put economics in its proper place?
A growing disenchantment with disenchantment has radically altered the intellectual terrain of the modern world.
While it is tempting to quip that theory is the opiate of the intellectuals, the addiction extends well beyond that single class.
We inhabit an unabashedly reality-adjacent world.
The great danger of our time is the loss of hope.
The essential component of the liberal project might be the marketplace of ideas.
Tocqueville was acutely conscious of living in a special moment in history
One of the challenges facing the world’s liberal democracies today is their failure to reckon sufficiently with the sources of civic solidarity that only myths can provide. Acknowledging the necessity of myth should help us think more clearly, critically, and constructively about our political myths
Exploring the evolution, uses, and effects of the distinctly modern cultural ideal of authenticity.
The capital of the economists is not the only capital that “makes the world go ’round.”
Who do we think we are? And why do we keep seeking answers to that question?
Americans are beginning to inhabit separate nations.
Péguy’s critical stance toward both broad coalitions made him neither a modernist nor an antimodernist, but something quite distinctive and instructive.
Numbers are arguably humankind’s most useful technology.
We children of the Enlightenment seem determined not only to seek out monsters but also to invent them.
Sketching a culinary ethos for the twenty-first century.
Who is secular man, and why is he so unhappy?
Reality is for people who can’t handle postmodernism.
Reconsidering the complex relationship between humans and the wider animal kingdom.
How do we judge the adequacy, efficacy, or value of various forms of identity in our struggle to secure not only equal rights and privileges but also meaning and community?
Great as they are, the challenges of the digital age are not only profoundly intellectual and conceptual.
We’re talking about something with far more power than a marketing tool.
Our Ubu is the Savage God who embodies the worst of us.
Donald Trump’s manner was a declaration of indifference toward the values that make democracy possible.
What does dominion “over every living thing that moves on the earth” mean? Brute sovereignty and ruthless exploitation? Or thoughtful stewardship and responsible cultivation?
As the power of science grows, its dominion extends even into areas of our culture where its proclaimed authority is questionable.
Summer reads from THR staff and friends.
Moyn's ambition for the discipline of history undercuts its legitimacy as a distinct form of knowledge and denies the ethic of the craft.