‘Illness and Its Very Concept’

Surveying a century of political struggles over medicine and psychiatry, a recent book foregrounds a West German collective that sought to create a radical, patient-led form of health care.

May 2, 2025

From Evasion to Defiance

As the courts resist his deportation orders, Trump has responded with shockingly bad-faith arguments—and brought the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis.

May 1, 2025

Mornings with Murray

New York City always got the towering journalist Murray Kempton at full sail.

April 27, 2025

Vance’s Junk History

J. D. Vance has cited Andrew Jackson to justify the idea that a president can disobey the federal judiciary’s rulings. The historical record says no such thing.

April 25, 2025

Mrs. Eddy Builds Her Empire

“Virtually every twentieth-century book or sect that promotes healing through the power of mind is in some ways a repackaging of the work of one woman, Mary Baker Eddy, the self-proclaimed ‘Discoverer and Founder’ of Christian Science.”

July 11, 1996 issue

Pioneers of Paranoia

“When Republicans founded ‘Democratic Societies,’ to protect civil liberties, Federalists saw them as the work of Jacobins sent to bring the reign of terror to America. Indeed the whole world was to be brought to its knees by a secret society known as the Bavarian Illuminati, dedicated to atheism and anarchy, an organization that existed only in the minds of fanatical Federalists.”

October 6, 1994 issue

The Fear of the Occult

“There was always a strong undercurrent of fear in the occultists, fear of the forces they might be invoking, anxiety to keep on the safe side in dealing with them.”

November 22, 1979 issue

Greetings from Far Away

“In 1967, Spiritualism began a comeback. It was, of course, part of the big Occult Explosion, but the strongest shove came from three men: the late Bishop James Pike, the later Reverend Arthur Ford, and Allen Spraggett, a Canadian fundamentalist preacher turned occult journalist.”

May 3, 1973 issue

In Praise of Public Libraries

“A public library is predicated on an ethos of sharing and egalitarianism. It is nonjudgmental. It stands in stark opposition to the materialism and individualism that otherwise define our culture. It is defiantly, proudly, communal.”

April 18, 2019 issue

How the FBI Turned Me On to Rare Books

The year was 1952. I had spent six months in France doing the first research for my PhD thesis. Not long after my return, two gentlemen from the US State Department arrived at our apartment to pick up my passport and that of my husband.

July 30, 2013

A Lost World

“The historian Vincent Harding raised an important question: ‘What is the role of the word—the spoken word, the preached word, the whispered-in-the-nighttime word, the written word, the published word—in the fight for black freedom?’”

July 3, 2003 issue

Mad About the Book

“I once owned twenty years’ worth of the bound newsletters of a Fort Worth asphalt company whose sideline was industrial grease; I was mentally preparing myself to own those newsletters forever when the writer Annie Proulx came streaking through Archer City, pausing in her dusty journeying just long enough to be swept up by the drama of asphalt.”

December 20, 2001 issue

The Deep Roots of Vaccine Hesitancy

Understanding the battle over immunization—from the pre-Victorian era onward—between public health and the people may help in treating anti-vax sentiment.

December 14, 2021

Resistance to Immunity

Opposition to vaccines has been around for as long as vaccines themselves. What can be done to convince the public that infectious disease is not a private concern?

May 23, 2019 issue

The Strange Politics of Saving the Children

A small number of simple medical supplies, including vaccines for measles, diphtheria, tetanus, and polio as well as oral rehydration solution could prevent about half of child deaths in the developing world, if only the international community would pay for them.

November 5, 2015 issue

Department of Defense

New ways of killing people have always been adopted with alacrity, but ways of preventing illness have sometimes taken centuries to be implemented.

October 8, 1987 issue

Working in Their Sleep

Meatpacking workers in Arkansas, grieving loved ones lost to Covid and struggling to pay medical bills, are organizing for justice from their employer.

December 23, 2022

What Apps Mean for Food Delivery Workers

Food delivery is nothing new. But in the online delivery industry, startups, flush with venture capital, have both altered and entrenched this historically exploitative low-wage work.

September 20, 2019

Why Work Is More and More Debased

“New technologies created new ways ‘of designing and monitoring the work of other parties,’ making it easier to outsource work while retaining and even intensifying control over worker performance.”

October 23, 2014 issue

The Golden Arm

“If we pretend that this transformation will automatically create new jobs for the men and women it displaces, we will probably end up with a vastly expanded underclass, not a vastly expanded pool of computer programmers.”

October 24, 1985 issue

An Overabundance of Virtue

The scholar James Hankins has argued that the revival of ancient virtues was a central concern of Renaissance humanists. But can those virtues also be revived in modern America?

September 21, 2023 issue

The Orphan Among Revolutions

Christopher Clark’s history of the 1848 revolutions highlights the destinies of individuals and the legacy of the tumults.

October 5, 2023 issue

History Bright and Dark

Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum and the documentary series based on the 1619 Project reflect deep divisions in how we recount our nation’s past.

May 25, 2023 issue

Blues, Grays & Greenbacks

Two new books argue that the innovations the Lincoln administration used to finance the Civil War transformed the nation from a modest and decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

May 25, 2023 issue

Leaving the Fold

The memoir of a former nun who left her convent after twelve years reveals the contradictions of the monastic life as well as the limits of memoir.

June 20, 2024 issue

Love in Plague Time

In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a novel that follows several hundred years in the life of an English nunnery in the Middle Ages, prioresses come and go, novices prove better or worse bets, and the masons leave the new chapel spire unfinished. But the interior voice speaks across the centuries.

January 16, 2020 issue

Our Literary Foremothers

Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

October 22, 2020 issue

Harrisburg: The Politics of Salvation

By 1970 Sister Elizabeth McAlister, a devout nun in the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary and an art history teacher at Marymount College, had been transformed by the recent revolution in the Church and the political turbulence of the 1960s. Then in 1970, she was arrested for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.

June 1, 1972 issue

The Man Who Was France

“Even the French who found themselves in England did not rush to accept de Gaulle: to the contrary, this remote and chilly figure lunching alone at the Savoy appealed to few of them, and most of the troops who had been evacuated from France that summer eventually made their way back across the Channel and regarded Pétain as the legitimate head of the French government.”

January 16, 2020 issue

The Truth About the Resistance

Who were the resisters, what were they resisting, and what difference did they really make?

February 25, 2016 issue

France Without Glory

“The political authorities born of the Resistance thought it prudent to speak and act as though the Vichy government of 1940–1944 had been a brief, unhappy interlude, a sort of illegitimate interruption of republican continuity…. This unity of purpose, however, was bought at the price of an incomplete confrontation with the memory and experience of the occupation years.”

May 23, 1996 issue

French Collaborators: The New Debate

“A striking fact about the Frenchmen indicted for crimes against humanity is that…each of them had an entirely successful career in France after the war.”

June 25, 1992 issue

Happy Accidents

“My work is on a constant mission to capture the magic spark in mundane, everyday moments and objects.”

April 26, 2025

Myths That Matter

“One might invoke the situation in India—the widespread damage that the Modi government has done to religious coexistence and free speech—to underline the danger to these precious rights in our own land.”

April 19, 2025

Continental Drift

“Over the past decade, common understanding of the EU as a peace project has weakened, and its stated purpose—to allow the free movement of people and goods—is no longer the political consensus.”

April 5, 2025

History in Open Air

“Local history bonds people today to the place where they are, giving them a stake in local people and local politics.”

March 29, 2025