The late Marcel Ophuls made films about the twentieth century’s great crimes—and the trail of guilt they left behind.

The following list gathers the twenty pieces our readers turned to the most, beginning with the most widely shared.

The massive development projects the Iraqi government has planned for the city seem designed to wipe it clean of its past memories.

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Political judgment takes place within political time. And political time is less a matter of chronology than of genre. What kind of moment are we living through? Is our system of government undergoing ...

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, ...

“Space is big,” wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). “You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down ...

When James Baldwin visited San Francisco in 1963 to film a documentary about U.S. racism, he encountered neighborhoods in turmoil: the city was seizing properties through eminent domain, razing them, ...

“Effective altruism,” the philanthropic movement founded on Peter Singer’s ideas, applies a consequentialist philosophy to the problem of global poverty. “Effective altruism,” the philanthropic ...

In an open lot on Detroit’s Eastside, a small red and sky-blue refrigerator hums underneath a hand-made shelter. On this windy February afternoon, Alyssa Rogers, one of the cofounders of Detroit ...

In 1947 Julian Huxley, English evolutionary theorist and director-general of UNESCO, wrote Mohandas Gandhi to ask him to contribute an essay to a collection of philosophical reflections on human ...