Like 15th Century portrait painters, we find ourselves amid an experimental period. It is unclear what the future will hold, whether it is standardized virtual bookshelves or targeted ads that suggest lipstick shades based on wall color.

Chloé Pelletier on the background to our Zoom backgrounds

The body politic metaphor became proof that the immigrant and the dependent were biologically incompatible with the rest of society. The community that grew out of this interpretation shaped itself in strange, unsettling, and inhumane ways.

G. Marie Aquilina traces the history of eugenics as a distortion of the body politic

The turn toward the body had three important effects on modern political philosophy: it naturalized security, individualized liberty, and privatized property.

Emily Davis reviews Birth of the State by Charlotte Epstein

When modernity lost its modularity, it became an asset to be fought over, a territory to be controlled. Modernity became the cool neighborhood that scholars jockeyed to buy into.

Daniel Zimmerman critiques the excess of periodization

Fratelli Tutti offers an alternative to such modern forms of domination and points to fraternal service as a way of countering its love of money, the desire that so often presents itself as development.

Trevor Williams reviews Pope Francis’s latest encyclical

Montaigne was charting new, and uniquely modern, territory. We embrace ourselves, as ourselves, and try to learn to be ourselves, rather than striving to become something other.

Erik Dempsey reviews Pierre Manent’s Montaigne: Life Without Law

Given all the transformations wrought and about to be wrought by COVID-19, we will see much more attention paid to the role of plagues, pandemics, and pestilences in shaping human affairs.

Andrew Latham looks to microbes to explain macro-changes in history.

The politics of nostalgia looks to translates the past into a near-future that is utterly inhospitable to it. It is about using the past-that-never-was to build a future-that-never-could-be.

Andrew Latham reads Dante’s Monarchia and Xi Jinping’s China Dream together.

Using these recipes privileges cultural memory and tradition over efficiency and precision. Thus, we participate in the ritual of cooking not as a means of scientific inquiry or perfection, but to strengthen the community ties that bring us together at the table.

Alexandrea Pérez Allison on cookbooks and modernity.

Modernity is more akin to an epistemological front, waxing and waning here and there in history, whose distribution might be unevenly spread across different human societies at any given moment.

Tim Howles expands on Bruno Latour's genealogies

Ideas have afterlives: they live on in subcultures that intentionally preserve them, in practices that have long lost their justification, and in our contradictions and nagging doubts.

John Buchmann offers a genealogy of balance and economics.

It is interesting to imagine an alternative history, one where Sanger had received the support she sought from eugenicists. What would our feminist genealogies look like then?

G. Marie Aquilina examines Margaret Sanger’s place in feminist genealogy

The roots of the present distemper go back to the turn of the twentieth century, when figures such as John Dewey sought to delete the Christian DNA from the genome of liberalism and insert Gnostic DNA in its place.

Andrew Latham does a genealogy of Gnostic Liberalism

The future of climbing is not modern. It is post-secular, mystical, communal, and intensely embodied, with technology merely incidental.

Ryan McDermott asks: When did climbing become modern?

We may still take the best of what calling cards have to offer: a more robust etiquette for managing our digital, social lives on a more humane timescale.

Kirsten Hall loses her phone and looks to the 18th Century for guidance.

Millions waited for a new, unknown magic to save the world from a final tragedy. The occultic had returned, but no one knew how to see it anymore.

Jason Blakely imagines the rise and fall of science and the occult.

Disney’s atom acts as an all-powerful sentient being, radioisotopes resemble the magical dust of Tinkerbell, and atomic energy emerges as the ultimate transmutation of matter that can lead to limitless health and wealth.

Christopher Fite finds a mix of power, ideology, and racism in a Disney film

Douthat begs us to consider the possibilities that we reached for in the past, less out of nostalgia, and more as inspiration: a cry of ‘Why not?’ that can lift us beyond screens, comfort, and deadlock toward a common goal.

Michael J. Nevadomski reviews Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society.

The racialization of crime in the United States can be traced all the way back to the earliest legislation directly addressing race relations: the slave codes.

Miranda Pilipchuk traces a genealogy of racism and sexism in the American judicial system.

Instead of free-thinking Deists, a new generation of physicians argued that the experience of paranormal phenomena indicated a kind of mental or physiological illness.

Richard Yoder looks to early modernity to examine magic, science, and the origins of modernity.