History of Ideas: David Foster Wallace

Today’s political fiction is a spy novel, a Cold War comedy and a meditation on the nature of good and evil: Graham Greene’s The Human Factor. Why has Greene so fallen out of fashion? What made the South African secret police his idea of pure evil? Was this book shaped by Greene’ ...  Show more

Today’s great political fiction is a path-breaking work of science fiction: David explores Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), which imagines a world without the need for government or coercive authority. What makes this the most realistic of all utopias? How was Le Guin’s ...  Show more

The Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace is so deeply enveloped in mythology that finding the real man can seem almost impossible. His life story has doubled as both entertainment and propaganda since it was first recounted by the minstrel Blind Harry in the 1400's. The film ...  Show more

The Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy’s new book, “Say It Loud!,” collects 29 of his essays. Kennedy’s opinions about the subjects listed in the book’s subtitle — ...

You’ve heard plenty by now about the fights over teaching critical race theory and the 1619 Project. But behind those skirmishes is something deeper: A fight over the story we tell about America. Why that fight has so gripped our national discourse is the question of this podc ...

The 1619 Project was a career-defining moment for New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. Released as a standalone issue of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-americ ...