David S. Reynolds reviews "The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman’s Civil War" by Lindsay Tuggle and "Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition" by Walt Whitman, edited by Lawrence Kramer.

Peter Sloterdijk has spent decades railing against the pieties of liberal democracy. Now his ideas seem prophetic. By Thomas Meaney.

illacertus

The daily newspaper columns of H.L. Mencken. By Bill Kauffman.

ICE at Dartmouth

The correspondence of René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia—a debate about mind, soul, and immortality. By Anthony Gottlieb.

How a late-blossoming classics don became Britain’s most beloved intellectual. By Charlotte Higgins.

The most influential US foreign-policy membership society has issued a report affirming the new Cold War and its eagerness to fight it. By Stephen F. Cohen.

“They drank the Kool-Aid and thought they were saving freedom." By Robert Scheer.

How an ACLU founder became an apologist for Soviet tyranny. By Matthew Harwood.

The late IPS co-founder consistently connected the dots between America’s military adventures overseas and economic and racial injustice at home. By Sarah Anderson. (Jan. 4, 2018)

We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. By Henry Farrell.

This brings us back to the question posed whenever a production of The Merchant of Venice is mounted: is this an antisemitic play, or a play about antisemitism? Indeed, if we need Shylock’s ‘Hath not a Jew’ speech to remind us that Jews are, in fact, human too, then we are dealing with a much larger cultural problem that productions of The Merchant of Venice play into. By Gabriella Edelstein.

Fifty years ago, France lost a war while trying to keep millions of Muslims French citizens. One French writer launched a movement to rethink “identity” in its aftermath and helped reinvent nationalism for the 21st century. By J. Lester Feder, Pierre Buet.

Though Wells and Orwell were debating in the era of Nazism, many of their arguments reverberate today in contemporary debates over science and policy. By Richard Gunderman.

The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: his view of black America is narrow and dangerously misleading. By Cornel West.

‘The Mists of Avalon’ changed my life—how do I reconcile that with what I now know about its author? By Jessica Jernigan.

How a piece of fictional satire nearly ruined the career of one journalist. By Walker Bragman.

When a Trillion Locusts Ate Everything in Sight. By Caroline Fraser.

The worst thing you can say about personal essayists is that they lack a personality. It’s the opposite with Diski. By Christian Lorentzen.