Our current use of “existential” is about as far removed from artsy-philosophical realms as you can imagine: It’s originally the province of defense analysts and foreign-policy think tanks, national-security types and people who write editorials[…]
Trump has been merciless toward anyone else in government who reveals his administration’s secrets, tweeting that ‘‘the real story that Congress, the F.B.I. and all others should be looking into is the leaking of Classified[…]
This term, first used by medieval commentators (see Zimmerman, p. 27, note 6), is, itself, an inaccuracy: Rabbi Zera merely describes a stringent practice which Babylonian Jewish women had taken upon themselves. Thus, the correct[…]
Pettiness often manifests itself as an outsize form of revenge — responding to mild slights by putting an absurd amount of energy into plotting meaningless reprisals. (One theory even claims this is how Donald Trump[…]
In the coming years, as most of America got online, some variation on the cyberporn cycle would repeat almost continuously: about chat-room child predators; about online games; about the emergence of social media; about sexting[…]
Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country.[…]
If there’s any historical development over the past few years that has reinforced the new allergy to devil’s advocacy, it’s the ascent of actual fascists — people who exploit liberal norms in the interest of[…]
The last thing a woman wants to be worrying about while in the heat of the moment is whether her arousal is an expression of her own eroticism or a symptom of patriarchal oppression. Yet,[…]
…out of the trauma and tragedy of the earlier decades of the 20th century, Jews redefined their image and reconstructed their roles in the post-World War II period. This represented a point in time when[…]
The United States had banned Mexican avocados since 1914 over fears of an insect infestation and cheaper competition. But in 1994, Mexico, Canada and the United States enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement —[…]