The Zero-Sum Squid Game
What the Korean hit gets wrong about capitalism and right about government.
Ilya Levine
· 9 min read
Religious Reasoning
The first and largest mistake Douthat makes in his new book is to argue that faith and rationality are mutually supportive.
Graham Daseler
· 15 min read
Ancient DNA and the Return of a Disgraced Theory
This is a story of some of the greatest findings in modern research, and of the dismal narrow-mindedness and motivated reasoning displayed by scholars who ought to know better.
Tristan S. Rapp
· 14 min read
How The Blues Brothers Saved American Music
The Blues Brothers (1980) fostered a renewed appreciation of some of the best music America has ever produced.
Jacob Bielecki
· 12 min read
Plotting Lives of Quiet Contentment
Modern literature’s tiresome preoccupation with misery and victimhood is neglecting whole swathes of the human experience.
Mallory Young
· 7 min read
Life’s Ancient Bottleneck
Of the six chemical elements necessary for life, phosphorus is the rarest. It determines what grows and shrinks, who lives and dies. By disrupting the planet’s phosphate cycle, unchecked factory farming could have apocalyptic consequences.
Jack Lohmann
· 8 min read
The Art of Social Engineering
When British sculptor Thomas J Price explains that his “strategy of inclusion” will counter the “endless stream of limiting tropes and identities for Black people,” he is inadvertently mimicking totalitarian injunctions.
Julia Friedman
· 6 min read
Feelings, Facts, and Our Crisis of Truth
What we lose when the rigour of science and journalism gives way to an aural and visual narrative culture.
Claire Lehmann
· 7 min read
The Age When Nothing Fits
‘Rebel Without a Cause’ remains a landmark classic, seventy years after its release.
Jarrod Sturnieks
· 12 min read
Brave New Marvel
Despite serious flaws, ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ is much better than Marvel’s recent offerings. Perhaps the franchise may have turned the corner.
William Barker
· 8 min read
Epic Failure
Many of the people involved in Uberto Pasolini’s new screen adaptation of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ are intimidatingly talented. It’s a pity, then, that the film is such a disaster.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
· 14 min read
A New Dark Age?
Political scientists have always extolled the ideal of the informed voter, but information has become a cacophony.
George Case
· 9 min read
All Men Behaving Badly
Just six months after it was released by Netflix, Anna Kendrick’s feminist film about a real serial killer already looks like an ideological relic.
Charlotte Allen
· 23 min read
Against the Tyranny of Opinionated Ignorance
Let us not confuse the freedom to speak with the freedom to mislead.
Yuki Zeman
· 5 min read
When Do Scholarly Retractions Become a Form of Censorship?
Focusing on the handful of papers that are retracted for political reasons can obscure the more important problems afflicting the field of academic publishing.
Ivan Oransky
· 12 min read