People who write professionally about Mariah Carey are required to note her staggering five-octave range, her fourteen top-ten albums, and her insane number of number-one singles (eighteen and counting). But I’m not here to count or be professional. I’m here to talk about Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel (2009), Mariah’s novel-length album, which is the thing I listen to while I try and try to write about intimacy.

Sociologist Peter Berger is right to see academe, alongside law and media, as one stronghold of “Euro-secularity” in a sea of American faith. Not so long ago, theology was academe’s queen. Today, God talk is largely verboten in American universities, even inside religious-studies departments like my own.

Imagine a delegation of chiefs from the Six Nations of the Iroquois passing through the rural town of Palmyra, New York, in the early 1800s. Among them is Red Jacket, the nephew of the most famous Iroquois prophet, Handsome Lake. Handsome Lake and his followers preached sobriety, conversed with spirits, and implored their beleaguered people to return to Iroquois traditions like the longhouse. Handsome Lake’s visions involved hidden scriptures that described the religious origins of the conflict between his people and whites and included a figure similar to Jesus. Quaker missionaries had lived among his tribe.

Over the next few days, Film Forum is showing three very different Macbeths: Orson Welles’s from 1948 (the director’s cut, complete with the Scottish brogues the studio had dubbed over), Akira Kurosawa’s from 1957 (Throne of Blood), and Roman Polanski’s from 1971. But the most recent film adaptation of Macbeth, released last month and still hanging on in theaters, is Justin Kurzel’s (with a screenplay by Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie, and Todd Louiso), in which Michael Fassbender plays the king as a scarred survivor, traumatized by war and by the death of his infant son.

Years ago, I taught a course on the French Revolution. At the end of one class, an earnest student posed a question about something that clearly troubled her. Being Korean, she wondered what this ruckus in eighteenth-century France had to do with her. Why study it in such exhaustive detail? Was France really that important? And why should what happened there 225 years ago matter to a young woman from half a world away?

The unseemly origins of Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations can be traced back to at least 1985, when the chairman of the New York State Republican Party visited him in his Trump Tower office, hoping to recruit him to run for governor. Trump responded that he’d only consider running for president. It was an idea encouraged by his driver and bodyguard Tom Fitzsimmons, a former cop. As Wayne Barrett writes in his classic and still definitive (as far as it goes) 1992 biography Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, it was Fitzsimmons who introduced Trump to Marla Maples: The notion was

The sun is shining, angry birds are tweeting, bees are dropping like flies: ’Tis a good day for a picnic in the graveyard of honor and humanity. Let us go and pay our disrespects at the tomb of 1959. A bygone age, suffused with the cologne of the quaint. Underneath lies an anarchic spirit waiting to be born again. Or snuffed out once and for all. The spirit in question can be summed up in a saying Graham Greene once procured from Gauguin: “Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.”

America’s justice system has been broken for a while. You can trace the development of our current blight of mass imprisonment—we have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world—in a nearly unbroken lineage from President Richard Nixon’s 1971 declaration of a “war on drugs,” through the disproportionate penalties for crack versus powder cocaine possession in the 1980s, to Bill Clinton’s reelection friendly 1994 crime bill. For many Americans, most of them poor and from communities of color, what policy wonks call the carceral state is a daily fact of life. That the iniquities of the entire justice system,

On a steamy Friday afternoon that felt more like late July than mid-September, I headed to the annual New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, aiming to learn more about the state of independent art publishing. Run by Printed Matter, the nonprofit organization that promotes artists’ books with evangelical zeal, the fair is now in its tenth incarnation, and included, among more than three hundred and fifty participants, art-book publishers from twenty-eight countries. Finding them was the challenge. With a floor plan in one hand (isn’t there an app for this?) and the miniature telephone book listing exhibitors in the

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Fine. Let’s start with “Negro,” or, if one prefers, “negro.” Even with this word’s present-day, often lower-case status, there are African Americans for whom “Negro” is a trigger word for outrage or affront. Some want the word excised altogether—which, at least to this African American, displays amnesia toward (or, worse, disrespect for) our collective history. Between the years 1900 and 1970 (give or take), “Negro” defined a people in transition through two world wars, a cultural renaissance, and a social and political movement that changed everything around it. Those who defined themselves as “Negro” flew airplanes to battle fascism, made