“A mental pentathlete.” That’s how Joyelle McSweeney describes the genre-defying Canadian writer Anne Carson—the winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, the subject of several other BR essays, ...

Climate politics are in a very weird place right now. On the one hand, current events would seem to be fertile ground—perhaps more fertile than ever—for generating popular support for climate action.

In early April, a committee of ten professors submitted a “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” to the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and ...

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, ...

On a Sunday in the summer of 1959, in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, Senator John F. Kennedy rose to address the banquet of the annual meeting of the American Society for ...

I first saw Davongie Stone last year through a small window in a very solid cell door. Representing Prisoners’ Legal Services, where I work as an attorney, I was touring a unit in Massachusetts’s ...

The week after taking office in 2017, Donald Trump announced his administration’s signature policy on the administrative state—the constellation of agencies, institutions, and procedures that Congress ...

“For me all that took place in Vietnam was inseparable from Hiroshima,” wrote the American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton in his 2011 memoir, Witness to an Extreme Century. He was referring to the ...

In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack in Israel, an international genocide debate has been unleashed. Some in the field of genocide studies, including Israeli historian Raz Segal and British ...

This essay appears in print in Reclaiming Freedom. On January 18 the Atlanta police, DeKalb County police, Georgia state troopers, and a SWAT team descended on a protest encampment in the Weelaunee ...

It seems almost quaint—at a time when the academy is under systemic attack by those who talk of facts, faith, the greatness of the Founders, and the still greater power of “woke” educators—that during ...