Sifting through a single day of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails reveals a surprising amount about the man and his many enablers.

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s history of the 1929 stock market crash reminds us that financial bubbles are inevitable—and that another one may be about to pop.

When an angel in a recently restored Roman chapel was seen to resemble Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, it touched off a very Italian scandal.

In David Greig’s novel The Book of I, a monk, a Viking, and a “mead wife” navigate a world torn between paganism and Christianity.

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t.

The Leiden Collection—one of the largest private collections of Dutch art in the world—was conceived as a “lending library for Old Masters,” animated by the humanist spirit found in Rembrandt’s paintings.

The representatives of our two-party system have made it into a weapon that works against the people.

The diary of the sixteenth-century physician Felix Platter is without precedent in early modern literature.

The Israeli writer S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh portrays the violent reality of the Nakba. For decades it was part of the canon of Hebrew literature. That has changed.

Progressives may have lost the battle for racial affirmative action, but ironically, Supreme Court decisions should allow colleges to give advantage to groups defined by their income, geography, or heritage.

A new history of satire wants to limit the genre to its political ramifications, but satirists are often interested in the whole person and their capacity for vice.

Chiang Kai-shek had enormous flaws as a leader, but something was nonetheless lost to China when he and his Republican government were forced into exile on Taiwan.

A new history brings to light the dissenting women who wrote, preached, and testified during England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, claiming the standing to speak as excluded outsiders who had an unfiltered knowledge of God.

In every era a certain kind of unprincipled demagogue driven by an insatiable need for attention and a sense of what will capture the public’s imagination rises to the fore. In the early years of France’s Third Republic, it was the ludicrous Marquis de Morès.

Cover art
Henni Alftan: Cold Weather, 2023 (Aurélien Mole/Karma/Sprüth Magers/ADAGP/Artists Rights Society)

Series art
Carly Blumenthal: Untitled, 2026