In the annals of public conversation, we seem to have reached toxic meltdown in the close of the mighty Mueller investigation. We’re past the “liar, liar, pants on fire” stage of a race to the ...

A conversation with Greg Grandin, Valeria Luiselli, and John Lanchester. A reckless wall-building era runs round the 21st century globe. Reckless next to the New England farmer in Robert Frost’s famous poem. He’s mending his wall in ...

Siri: what is ‘artificial intelligence’? In computer science, she says, AI can refer to any device that senses its environment and responds to reach a goal. A simple translation of A. I. as, say, ‘robotic ...

A conversation with John Kaag and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen on Nietzsche, philosophy, and life. The news about Nietzsche, as you may have heard, is that the nastiest old name in German philosophy doesn’t scare us anymore. ...

Could it possibly be that Stanford’s great humanist Robert Pogue Harrison invented René Girard out of sheer longing for an omni-theorist of our interlocking social and spiritual trials? Harrison presented Girard in a striking piece ...

A conversation with George Church and Antonio Regalado about gene editing and the future of biotech. Ready or not, we are at the gateway into CRISPR world and CRISPR think: CRISPR the acronym for biology’s ...

A conversation about the movies with A. S. Hamrah, Beth Gilligan, Katherine Irving. We’ve reached that odd ritual of cultural reckoning. Between the Super Bowl and Opening Day of the national pastime, Hollywood holds up ...

Mahatma Gandhi led the liberation of India from British rule in the first half of the 20th Century, by massive and peaceful resistance. He is said to be out of political fashion in India these ...

A conversation on the crisis in Venezuela with Alejandro Velasco, Jeff Sachs, Greg Grandin, and Leo Blanco. The ruin of Venezuela and the world’s answer to it mark the climax of an epic, late in ...

A conversation about Astra Taylor’s new documentary What Is Democracy? with Astra Taylor, David Runciman, and Kali Akuno. We used to know what we liked about that word ‘democracy,’ and we were ready to fight for ...