The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as ‘Fat Man and Little Boy.’) And a river...

At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the...

Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the London Review of Books published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward...

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn’t fully grasp (partly because I was far...

Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky [“Letters,” December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the “roots” of September 11. I rush to agree....

To seek the self, one must first have a clear idea of what one is looking for. Thus, some meditation manuals advise actively cultivating the sense of self, despite the fact that this sense is...

The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.

The destruction of this universe would have no significance on a cosmic scale.