The Best of Boston Review

Allured by the promise of Big Data, science has shortchanged causal explanation in favor of data-driven prediction. But ultimately we must ask why.

In his sweeping new history, the economist systematically demolishes the conceit that extreme inequality is our destiny, rather than our choice.

Narrative medicine claims to champion the experience of patients—but it does so by requiring that the sick “earn” their care by telling a redemptive tale about what is wrong with them.

Philosopher William MacAskill contends that humanity’s long-term survival matters more than preventing short-term suffering and death. His arguments are shaky.

At a time of anxiety about fake news and conspiracy theories, philosophy can contribute to our most urgent cultural and political questions about how we come to believe what we think we know.

«Democracies are especially vulnerable to epistemic threats because in needing the deliberative participation of their citizens, they must place a special value on truth.»

Critics say human rights discourse blunts social transformation. It doesn't have to.

Movement building requires a culture of listening—not mastery of the right language.

Historian Gerald Horne has developed a grand theory of U.S. history as a series of devastating backlashes to progress—right down to the present day.

Reflecting on three monumental works of modernism—James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—a hundred years on.

In a sweeping new history of Western philosophy, Jürgen Habermas narrates the progess of humanity through the unfolding of public reason. Missing from that story are the systems of violence and…

The Global South will suffer the most as colonial legacies, climate change, and capitalism continue to plunge millions into hunger.

Younger voices are using technology to respond to the needs of marginalized communities and nurture Black healing and liberation.

Freedom means a world where how I parent is simply mundane rather than overburdened with meaning.

Philosopher Karl Popper famously asked how to tell the two apart. His answer—falsifiability—hasn’t aged well, but the effort lives on.