Sponsored by Lionel Gelber Prize
Joshua Leifer
Whose Constitution, Whose Democracy?
Many opponents of Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul have called for Israel to finally draft a constitution, but any serious attempt will mean choosing between a democratic state and one that privileges Jewish citizens above all others.
Alizeh Kohari
Flipping the Script in Lahore
Joyland and the documentary Showgirls of Pakistan explore the boundaries of identity and desire in an oppressively performative society.
Garry Wills
What Friends Are For
For decades Justice Clarence Thomas has received lavish gifts from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. What’s Crow been getting in return?
Christopher Benfey
Unsilent Spring
Spring just got noisier.
Walker Mimms
Curbstones on the Road to Modernism
Labeled “naïve” for his quickly-hewn limestone sculptures, the Nashville stonemason William Edmondson was anything but.
Free from the Archives
This month is the fiftieth anniversary of Peter Singer’s influential essay “Animal Liberation,” which was first published in The New York Review’s issue of April 5, 1973. Singer’s article—which he expanded into a book in 1975—became one of the founding documents of the modern animal rights movement, providing a philosophical foundation for vegetarians, activists who protest scientific testing on animals, and anyone who believes that it is immoral to abuse or kill animals. As Singer argued in 1973, “A liberation movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons, so that practices that were previously regarded as natural and inevitable are now seen as intolerable.”
Peter Singer
Animal Liberation
“If possessing greater intelligence does not entitle one human to exploit another, why should it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans?”
