Readings

In this excerpt from her new book on religious violence, Fields of Blood, Karen Armstrong examines the psychological impact of World War I and the birth Protestant fundamentalism in the U.S.

Oh, like you've never cancelled an album because of a bad ecstasy trip.

Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person, like Christopher Nolan's Memento, is about the selection of memory; perhaps we're much worse than we recall.

How Marvel, Netflix, and others harness the past and future to keep us immersed in an anticipatory, amnesic, spectacular now.

Lenny Bruce, First Amendment crusader, broke ground for arguably every significant comic in his wake. Laughing at his material can seem like a civic duty. But does it hold up?

The author of My Struggle talks about memory, translating the Bible, and his most epic of autobiographies as an act of “re-staging something that is inside of me.” 

The Maze Runner depicts a world without adults: a giant maze beset by giant monsters. Is it a utopia?

What does one former member of a terrorist group—"the last of the big-time dreamers," as he's called in Claire Holden Rothman's new novel, My October—have to say about civil liberties?

Not everyone's lucky enough to escape their haunts.