A new book by Michael Gordin shows how 16 months in Prague formed a young Albert Einstein—and the shape of science, politics, and intellectual history to come.

Is UBI an idea whose time has come, or just a populist gimmick? With automation set to disrupt millions of jobs over the next decade, the stakes of answering that question have never been higher.

There are lessons to be learned for the United States in studying democratic decline abroad, but it’s also easy to take the comparisons too far.

How technology supercharged the spread of disinformation, and what we can do about it.

The idea of historical inevitability just won’t die. But there was nothing unavoidable about our current political crisis.

This year’s Czech elections prove that politically disruptive populism does not line up exclusively with extreme right-wing ideologies.

A new biography of John le Carré could have told us so much more than it does.

The erasure of historical memory has a high price.

Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth fails to convince in its reinterpretation of the Holocaust, and its forecast of the next one.

Whether they like it or not, the Czechs are the nation of Havel. What they need to work out, with the help of biographies like Michael Žantovský’s, is what that means.