Adam Gopnik

Visiting the site where the Civil War began, for clues on how the cold war of the present may end.

Émilie du Châtelet’s scientific contributions were appreciated by some, then forgotten by all. But redeeming her as a mind shouldn’t undermine her as a woman.

Even many of the ex-President’s opponents haven’t grasped the scale of the man’s villainy.

Our carceral system is characterized by frequent brutality and ingrained indifference. Finding a better way requires that we freely imagine alternatives.

The Shakespearean end to a distinguished reign.

Remarkably—to some, astonishingly—the election produced a better outcome than one might have hoped for. Sunday’s result put the R.N. in a poor third place, behind the New Popular Front (N.F.P.) coalition of the left and the surprisingly scrappy centrist party of President Emmanuel Macron. Macron’s gamble in fighting the R.N. by dissolving the National Assembly, after the far right’s triumph in the meaningless but highly visible European Parliament elections, has to be declared, if not a success,…

Actual facts—and that near-relation of actual facts, widely distributed images—seem to confirm this view. Between 1995 and 2008, necktie sales plummeted from more than a billion dollars to less than seven hundred million, and, if a fashion historian on NPR is to be believed (and if you can’t believe NPR . . . ), ties are now “reserved for the most formal events—for weddings, for graduations, job interviews.” Post-pandemic, there is no sign of a necktie recovery: a now famous photograph from the…

The late, great ballplayer’s myth had a specifically New York aspect.

A hard thinker to pigeonhole, Taylor has long been a mainstay of Canada’s social-democratic left; he helped found the New Democratic Party, running for office several times in Quebec, though losing, inevitably, to the Liberal Party and the charismatic Pierre Trudeau. He’s also a Catholic and a singularly eloquent critic of individualism and secularism, those two pillars of modern liberalism. He worries about the modern conception of the self—what he has called “the punctual self”—which he takes…

The just-concluded elections for the European Parliament have some of the character of lion’s-mouth communication on a continental scale. The European Parliament is, like the Venetian Senate, mostly a pro-forma talking shop with limited power: actual political power still resides in the national governments, while the power to initiate and implement all those European rules and decrees with which “Brussels” supposedly encumbers its members—such as classifying bananas according to how bendy they…