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ON A FEBRUARY MORNING in Washington, a hotel ballroom is packed with people eager to hear Jonathan Haidt explain what's wrong with higher education. His talk is part of the [...]

One night this spring, the New York Institute for the Humanities hosted a gathering to discuss, as the title of the event put it, 'new public intellectuals.' At the front [...]

NEW YORK ON A MONDAY EVENING in mid-October, the historian Tony Judt appeared onstage at the Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, in Greenwich Village. 'I hope you [...]

A LITTLE AFTER 8 A.M. on a Tuesday last September, Clayton Christensen walked onstage at the convention center in Orlando. Concert-caliber spotlights circled the room. Tall and slightly stooped, dressed [...]

IN APRIL 2011, then-Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to the University of New Hampshire to talk about campus sexual assault. 'It's quite simple: No means no,' Biden told [...]

Michael Ignatieff President and rector of Central European University 'Do I look like my hair is on fire?' Michael Ignatieff slipped off his suit jacket and took a seat. His [...]

Byline: Interview by Evan R. Goldstein Q. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is No. 1 on Amazon.com, a New York Times best seller, and a bona fide sensation. [...]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARIES Rage over racial, gender, and sexual identity has no sense of proportion and creates a damaging spectacle, says Mark Lilia, a professor of humanities at Columbia University. In [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein On the night of May 2, 2011, Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, was huddled in a Toronto hotel suite to await election [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein IStock Photo iStock 'What are you working on?' is academe's standard conversation starter, and for the past five years Geoffrey Nunberg has had a nonstandard response: [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein Cathy Carver Jill Nathanson's painting 'And I Will Write on These Tablets' (2005) It began with a phone call. 'This is Felix Posen. Do you know [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein Illustrations by Harry Campbell for The Chronicle Review In the basement of the Northwest Science Building here at Harvard University, a locked door is marked with [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein Bernard Lewis left Princeton University in 1986, forced out at the then-mandatory retirement age of 70. At his farewell party, Charles Issawi, who was also retiring [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein One day in September 2006, a manifesto arrived in Alan Wolfe's in box. 'Radical Islamism,' it argued, is 'the third major form of totalitarian ideology of [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein 'I'd never seen anyone die before,' says the quivering voice on the recording. She identifies herself as Donna Jensen, a 50-something computer programmer. On the morning [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein 'I have a dirty mind,' says Wayne Koestenbaum, poet, critic, and professor of English at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. We're sitting in [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein At 6 p.m. on January 27, 1942, Konrad Jarausch, a staff sergeant in the German army, died in a hospital near the Russian city of Smolensk. [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein Francis Fukuyama has been accused of many thingsÇötriumphalism, utopianism, warmongeringÇöbut never a lack of ambition. True to form, his new book, The Origins of Political Order [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein Midway through David Brooks's new book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (Random House), Erica, a fictional character, writes a memo [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein A simple but far-reaching idea runs through Robin Fox's forthcoming book, The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind (Harvard University Press): Human nature was decisively [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein Ours is the age of the video game. In the United States alone, 183 million people devote an average of 13 hours a week to video [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein Jean-Paul Sartre said that the greatest gift a father can give his son is to die early. Sartre's remark, though harsh, isn't implausible. In a new [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein What does it mean to look at a photograph of someone about to be murdered? While a corpse can be shocking and grotesque, at least that [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein San Diego -- 'America, this is madness and you know it.' Glenn Beck stares into the camera during an early-September broadcast of his show on the [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein On the afternoon of May 19, 1894, the strangled and stabbed body of a woman was found in the town of Beaurepaire, France. The killer -- [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein On a bright, hot day in 1970, Bob Dylan, clad in cap and gown, received an honorary doctorate from Princeton University. Introduced as 'the authentic expression [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein 'As a happily married academic, I have been blissfully insulated from serious concerns about appearance,' writes Deborah L. Rhode, a professor of law at Stanford University [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein When Sheena S. Iyengar was a graduate student in social psychology at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, she liked to visit Draeger's Market in nearby Menlo [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein In 1995, George A. Akerlof, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, circulated a working paper on the impact of social class [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein On a Wednesday afternoon in late October, David Gelernter is seated at the head of a green Formica table in a small classroom in Arthur K. [...]

Byline: Evan R. Goldstein Isaiah Berlin -- renowned liberal theorist, historian of ideas, Oxford don, cultural gadfly -- was one of the great raconteurs of his generation. According to Robert [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN 'Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning,' Mark C. Taylor declares in a hotly debated op-ed column published last month in The New York Times. [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN On March 1, 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks, was captured in Pakistan. He was transported to an American-run [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN One day in October 2005, Seung-Hui Cho shuffled into Lucinda Roy's spacious corner office in Shanks Hall on the campus of Virginia Tech. Behind a baseball [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN New York -- On a bright, frozen morning in January, Rashid Khalidi is set to talk about his new book, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN On June 26, 2000, Bill Clinton convened a news conference in the East Room of the White House to mark the first complete map of the [...]

Byline: Compiled by EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN Is your affection for, say, Van Gogh's 'The Starry Night' or the Iliad merely a reflection of personal taste? Or do those masterpieces tend [...]

Byline: Compiled by EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN Is it time for the newspaper industry to publish its own obituary? Consider the past year. As more and more people turned to the [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN In 1966 a group of friends gathered for a dinner party in Manhattan. As the evening was winding down, one of the guests, Lloyd N. Morrisett, [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN 'I'm running the risk of being tarred and feathered,' Godfrey Hodgson says from his home in London. He is speaking about the potential fallout from his [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN 'I can't possibly count the number of people I have met over the years who've said, 'You write like an old man,'' Jill Lepore says with [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN Margaret Mead's first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was published in 1928. A comparative study of sexual mores among adolescents in Samoa and the United [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN 'I feel like a traveling statesman,' Gilles Kepel jokes during a recent phone call from Morocco. Though meant in jest, the title of statesman is not [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN When I catch John Patrick Diggins on the telephone to talk about the election and presidential leadership, he has just returned from an event at the [...]

Byline: Compiled By EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN The end of the presidential election will bring not just a new administration and Congress but also, perhaps, some closure to a debate that [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN 'Take a deep breath,' Pardis Mahdavi's male companion whispered to her when they arrived at the party. Most of the revelers were gathered around a large [...]

Byline: EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN It is too early to tell whether recent economic bombshells will force the presidential candidates into a sustained discussion of actual issues, but weeks of debate [...]