From its origins in the classical physique and homoerotic spectacle, bodybuilding today often involves the use of steroids whose dangers are not properly understood.

American lore about hoboes has sugared over the economic and environmental forces that drove people from their homes and onto the rails and roads in the first place, as a new history lays out.

The AI boom is only the latest stage in Silicon Valley’s long history of creating and expanding intellectual monopolies.

A dual biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek is a tantalizing portrait of the artists and their epoch, just before the catastrophe of AIDS.

Ali Smith’s paired novels Gliff and Glyph are like a set of mirrors installed at irregular angles: themes repeat, flash, and fade, reflecting the afterimages of stories we can’t process or forget.

The Internet and the smartphone have become formidable tools for the Chinese government to maintain tight control over society.

In both Philip Glass’s most avant-garde and his most commercially successful works, his music seems to accompany some unheard melody while inducing a state of blissful distraction.

Almost fifty years after the Czechoslovak human rights initiative Charter 77 was first reported in the Review’s pages, Václav Havel’s own long-lost account of his imprisonment now appears in English for the first time.

The reissue of Wilfrid Sheed’s 1966 novel Office Politics, about the dramas of running a literary magazine, raises the question of reprints and their popularity today.

In eighteenth-century London, syphilis was “the secret disease” that lived in plain sight, and its diagnosis helped modernize the medical profession.

By ending the independence of federal agencies, the Supreme Court has taken another step toward the creation of an elected presidential dictatorship.

Ithell Colquhoun improvised with Surrealist and occult divinatory techniques in her paintings, and also in her writing—and in this lies her true originality.

Jonathan Buckley’s books embody the idea of writing as self-effacing transmission; their attentiveness to minor characters may be what the novel was built to do, but today it can feel radical.

Over the course of his life Jürgen Habermas sought to honor the principle that in a modern democracy the only legitimate force should be the unforced force of the better argument.

The artists Rosemary Mayer and Ree Morton shared an affinity for bringing fabrics, flowers, and language into work that linked personal history to public display.

A group exhibition explores humans’ ubiquitous but varied habit of plundering their environments for raw materials and more.