The late Marcel Ophuls made films about the twentieth century’s great crimes—and the trail of guilt they left behind.

The following list gathers the twenty pieces our readers turned to the most, beginning with the most widely shared.

The massive development projects the Iraqi government has planned for the city seem designed to wipe it clean of its past memories.

Give the gift of BR with a one-year subscription to our quarterly issues, plus digital access to our entire print archive dating back to our founding in 1975. By purchasing this product, you’ll ...

Political judgment takes place within political time. And political time is less a matter of chronology than of genre. What kind of moment are we living through? Is our system of government undergoing ...

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, ...

“Space is big,” wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). “You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down ...

When James Baldwin visited San Francisco in 1963 to film a documentary about U.S. racism, he encountered neighborhoods in turmoil: the city was seizing properties through eminent domain, razing them, ...

This essay appears in print in Is Equal Opportunity Enough?. In June 2020 Donald Trump tweeted, in characteristically hyperbolic style, that his administration had “done more for the Black Community ...

U.S. history is a strange, exceptional field of play where, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s famous sign-off from Lake Wobegon, all the revolutions are strong, all the revolutionaries are kind, and ...