Kwame Anthony Appiah | The New York Review of Books

Translation’s Drift

Two books look closely at both the limitations and the possibilities of the art of literary translation.

The Philosophy of Translation

by Damion Searls

Speaking in Tongues

by J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos

June 26, 2025 issue

Symphilosophizing in Jena

The intellectual achievements of the early German Romantics were inseparable from their friendships and feuds.

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

by Andrea Wulf

Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits

by Peter Neumann, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch

October 20, 2022 issue

Liberation Psychology

How Frantz Fanon came to view violence as therapy.

The Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon, translated from the French by Richard Philcox, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, a foreword by Homi K. Bhabha, and an introduction by Cornel West

February 24, 2022 issue

The Roots of Inequality: An Exchange

January 13, 2022 issue

Digging for Utopia

In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow search for historical examples of nonhierarchical societies to justify their anarchist vision of human freedom. But must we find our future in the past?

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

December 16, 2021 issue

Exchange

David Wengrow

The Roots of Inequality: An Exchange

January 13, 2022 issue

The Prophet of Maximum Productivity

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.

Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics

by Charles Camic

January 14, 2021 issue

The Defender of Differences

On Franz Boas and his critics

Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist

by Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

by Charles King

From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology

by Mark Anderson

May 28, 2020 issue

The Key to All Mythologies

Lévi-Strauss: A Biography

by Emmanuelle Loyer, translated from the French by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff

Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought

by Maurice Godelier, translated from the French by Nora Scott

February 13, 2020 issue

Herder in the Balance

September 26, 2019 issue

Voltaire’s Tears

June 6, 2019 issue

Dialectics of Enlightenment

‘Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason’ by Justin E.H. Smith

Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

by Justin E.H. Smith

May 9, 2019 issue

Letter

David Ball

Voltaire’s Tears

June 6, 2019 issue

Letter

Zeev Sternhell

Herder in the Balance

September 26, 2019 issue

An Open Letter to Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, and Donald Tusk, President of the European Council

March 21, 2019 issue

The Red Baron

On Michael Young and the ideal of meritocracy

October 11, 2018 issue

Surreal Anthropology

Phantom Africa

by Michel Leiris, translated from the French by Brent Hayes Edwards

March 8, 2018 issue

The Achievement of Achebe

The genius of Chinua Achebe, like all genius, escapes precise analysis. The first of the novels in his “African trilogy” defined a starting point for the modern African novel.

May 22, 2017

Turkey’s Attack on Teachers

April 21, 2016 issue

Letter

Seyla Benhabib

Turks, Teachers & Kurds

May 12, 2016 issue

Murder in Mexico: An Open Letter

September 24, 2015 issue

We’re Still Puzzled

The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House

by Edward Klein