The late Marcel Ophuls made films about the twentieth century’s great crimes—and the trail of guilt they left behind.

The massive development projects the Iraqi government has planned for the city seem designed to wipe it clean of its past memories.

Give the gift of BR with a one-year subscription to our quarterly issues, plus digital access to our entire print archive dating back to our founding in 1975. By purchasing this product, you’ll ...

U.S. history is a strange, exceptional field of play where, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s famous sign-off from Lake Wobegon, all the revolutions are strong, all the revolutionaries are kind, and ...

There have been no higher-stakes public investments recently than those the federal government made in biomedical research and production to make COVID-19 vaccines. Many commentators, conservatives ...

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, ...

Last August the New York Times Magazine released a special issue they called the 1619 Project, which uses the 400th anniversary of the arrival of “20 and odd” enslaved Africans in Virginia to recast ...

What happens next and how to take things seriously are difficulties these texts have something to tell us about—something we need, still, to learn. This account of these three notoriously difficult ...

The idea of a privatized state sounds like a contradiction. Yet it is the state of contradiction in which we currently live. Without exaggeration, one may say that if the twentieth century was the age ...

On the eve of the November 1938 midterm elections, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a forceful radio address. “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and ...

“Effective altruism,” the philanthropic movement founded on Peter Singer’s ideas, applies a consequentialist philosophy to the problem of global poverty. “Effective altruism,” the philanthropic ...