Winter 2026

Four years ago I began going to Little Lina, a hamlet of fifty households a few hours’ trek from the nearest road winding through the Chinese Himalaya. My aim was to find out how grand ideas about poverty alleviation and …

We are grateful for the historical and constitutional perspective that William Galston brings to his stimulating response. He does not dispute our charge that the present regime of religious accommodation rests on philosophically unsound arguments. Instead, he says this is …

When Mark Twain published The Innocents Abroad in 1869, he had in mind entertaining his readers with a travel book about a group of naïve Americans who make a pleasure trip to Europe and the Middle East aboard the steamship …

You wish that people who want to challenge your work would reach out, send an e-mail, or pick up the phone. I get many such e-mails. The result is often learning for me, for my interlocutor, and for both of …

Controversy in the summer and fall of 2010 over plans for the construction of an Islamic community center in New York City near Ground Zero reminds us that America’s legacy of religious freedom is by no means settled. Debates about …

I am shocked, shocked, and in a tizzy, about demands from Wisconsin Republicans to read the e-mail of faculty members at the state university. Can they do that? Can Republicans in my state demand to read my e-mail? I am …

For decades after it came out in 1925, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, portraying an episode in the first Russian Revolution of 1905, was commonly described as the greatest film of all time. Even at the height of the Cold War, …

Years ago, in 1983, I published a book called Spheres of Justice, which was an attempt to give an account of distributive justice in domestic society. I said virtually nothing in that book about distributive justice in international society. Since …

If you look at recent academic discussions about the good and bad energies brought into play by patriotism, you are struck by a certain elusiveness regarding the commitment of the commentators. Patriotism, the love of our country, is sometimes presented …

Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White W. W. Norton and Company, 2011, 634 pp. FOR A generation now, historians have been reluctant to write about capitalism. Cultural history has been the rage, even as …

Is religion “special”? Taking this as a philosophical question, we might conclude that it is not, that religion is a specific instance within a more general category of belief or commitment. But a philosophical question is not the same as …

In January 2011, on our first night in Durzay, one of the last Taliban-held enclaves in Southern Helmand Province, we occupied a compound just outside the main villages. Captain Abdullah, the commander of the Afghan National Army (ANA) infantry unit …

When we took to the open road that leads from college to anywhere, my friend Kate and I worried about falling into tourism. The hope of every serious traveler is to become entangled in new surroundings, to be a little …