Why Was There a Reformation?
It is a rare and in this case curious event for a major university press to reissue an unrevised forty-year-old college textbook, in a field that...
Malcolm’s Ministry
At the end of his remarkable, improbable life, Malcolm X was on the cusp of a reinvention that might have been even more significant than his...
Fiction and Life
To the Editors: I’m delighted the Review chose to write about my most recent book [“A Sickness in the Air,” NYR, February 11], but troubled by...
The Stench of American Neglect
In 1941 Walker Evans, a photographer, and James Agee, a journalist for Time and Fortune magazines, published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, their idiosyncratic Depression-era...
Past Imperfect
To “jump the gun” is to act too soon, before the proper time, to leave the blocks before the starting pistol has gone off, but what...
Pranksters and Puritans
Missing from the traditional Thanksgiving narrative—the brutal winter followed by the bountiful harvest—is the horrific epidemic that raged through the Native American community during the three...
The Power of Catastrophic Thinking
T. S. Eliot, in his 1944 essay “What Is a Classic?,” complained that a new kind of provincialism was becoming apparent in our culture: “a provincialism,...
The Case for a Third Reconstruction
Since the election of Joe Biden to the presidency, it is clear that our democracy is at a turning point. The first order of business of...
Deaccessioning Empire
About ten years ago I read a news story reporting that one thousand human skulls from Germany’s former African colonies had been “discovered” at the Charité...
