Happy Fucking Birthday An exhausted America turns two hundred and fifty

England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante. Who is the great poet of America?

When Duchamp took New York: Europe spurned him, so he decamped to America, where he was met with exaltation and outrage

America Spent a Fortune Shooting Down Cheap Drones. Now the Missile Stores Are Bare.

No one is self-made

Open Thread

What Happens When We Die

America's Founders Blended Liberalism and Religion

The Complexity of Letting Go

Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island

Will It Take Superpowers, Spirits and Reincarnation to Save the Planet?

The Democratic Socialists of America Just Adopted a Radical New Platform

What 1976 Got Right About America

Trump Sees World Cup Visitors as a Threat, But America Sees a Chance for Hospitality

Americans Still Believe in the Founding—and Want Schools To Teach Capitalism

A prototype differential atom interferometer for fundamental physics

1776 All-Stars: Why a Pseudonymous Anti-Federalist Is My Favorite Founder

Dwight Macdonald opposed World War II, denounced the atom bomb, and never found an ideological home. Was he right?

Toni Morrison believed that racial blackness and whiteness and redness — potent though they may be — are just that: stories 

Paracelsus & the Womb of Being

How the brain builds sentences, neuron by neuron