Philosophy & Religion

In Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of “a family and a culture in crisis,” J.D. Vance, now vice-president of the United States, gives an evocative account of the relationship between his hometown and the heroic age of American industrial capitalism.1 The beating heart of Middletown, Ohio, was its steel plant, then called Armco. Vance […]

The post Forced Amnesia appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

For almost all of its thirty-year duration, it seemed quite natural to think of the conflict in Northern Ireland, unfolding just a few dozen miles away from my hometown of Dublin, as an anachronism. The local joke was that when planes landed at Belfast airport, the pilot announced, “Welcome to Belfast. Put your watches back […]

The post Defying Tribalism appeared first on The New York Review of Books.