Louis Menand is a writer of great gifts, whose 2000 book The Metaphysical Club is a masterpiece of intellectual history. Unfortunately, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War fails to recapture the magic. That’s partly because despite its bulk—880 pages—it’s curiously incomplete.

Oedipus the King has been considered a masterpiece for two and a half millennia. No less a luminary than Aristotle called it the ideal tragedy. But today’s readers are often disturbed by its apparent injustice. How is it fair that the gods consign Oedipus—a genuine hero who strives to avoid committing the sins for which he is damned—to such an awful fate?

Root’s book provides a thoroughly researched and readable introduction to the arguments that formed the basis of what has rightly been called the “refounding” of the United States a century and a half ago—and that remain relevant today.

Far from a history of liberty, de Dijn’s book is a conscious effort to undermine that concept and to substitute in its place what she calls a “democratic conception of freedom,” which, in principle, amounts to collective control over every aspect of individual behavior.

Markovits’s reliance on loaded language is a good sign that his argument cannot stand—pardon the pun—on its own merits.

The Property Species suggests fruitful speculations to demonstrate that property is a truly universal manifestation of human rationality and of man’s needs, not only to survive, but also thrive.

In Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay explore the connections between such phenomena as “shoutdowns,” “canceling,” and identity politics on the one hand and the philosophical doctrines taught in America’s universities on the other.

More than any of his contemporaries, Sargent expressed the glamour that emerging capitalism made possible. Yet that is just what made him incomprehensible or unacceptable to later artists and critics.

Often scorned and rejected in her own day, Zora Neale Hurston was a pioneering writer who looked beyond the controversies of her time and sought to articulate a lasting vision of life—one free of bitterness or pettiness and full of grace and beauty.

Dorothy Fontana, who died this week at the age of eighty, is best known for her work as a writer for the original Star Trek television series. But, in fact, she was one of the most remarkable women in Hollywood history.

Exemplars of Enlightenment thinking, Deborah Feldman, Yeonmi Park, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali escaped oppression in pursuit of freedom, rational inquiry, and the life these values make possible. They are models for us all.

The bravery of today’s Hong Kong protestors is nothing short of incredible. Confronting the massive forces of the world’s largest and most bloodstained dictatorship, they stand for freedom against overwhelming odds. Yet they remain undaunted.

Stevie Ray Vaughan left lasting monuments to his musical genius—and a lesson about the importance of focusing on the important things in life.

Robert Eggers’s lovingly crafted The Witch and The Lighthouse conjure the eerie beauty of the New England idiom to evoke a few chills.

A. E. Stallings witnesses every day the juxtaposition of ancient and modern, and her work combines the haunting beauty of Greek myth with the daily occupations of modern life.