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.

Baghdad was cloaked in its familiar shroud of darkness when, in early October, I walked the al-Shuhada Bridge across the Tigris—more a ritual for me than a pastime. Long before Walter Benjamin ...

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, ...

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, ...

Contrary to the Obama administration, U.S. health care spending isn’t high because Americans use too much medicine. The real culprit is our fragmented and privatized system. For more than a decade, ...

More than a century before Zohran Mamdani declared he wanted a New York City network of grocery stores “focused on keeping prices low,” socialists in Spain were furious about a network of grocery ...

Science is under fire as never before in the United States. Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump and his Republican allies dismiss the findings of health experts as casually as those of ...

The images inspired by Michael Javen Fortner’s new book, Black Silent Majority, are revealing. A New Yorker review featured a graphic rendering of somber black men clad in orange jumpsuits imprisoned ...

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 ...