The dramatic liberties a much-heralded film takes with historical fact show how hard it is to get complexity onto the big screen.

What does satire do? What should we expect of it? Is it crucial to Western culture that we be free to produce it?

On the artist’s portrayal of violence and humanity.

December 1944, Auschwitz.

A 2003 essay that foreshadows the emergence of the Islamic State a decade later – an insurgency incited by American policy in Iraq during the early days of the war.

What the Chinese education system can teach America about relying on test scores as the main metric of success.

A judge on the history and injustice of the plea bargain in America.

On a book of photographs shot by Leni Riefenstahl in the 1950s and 1960s depicting an African tribe.

Understanding genius.

The history of a color.

A 15-year-old Russian has a shorter life expectancy than a peer in Bangladesh, Cambodia, or Yemen.

Do jellyfish have minds?

“Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can…”

Dick Cheney and the political history of warrantless surveillance.

Notes from a month-long voyage on a massive container ship.

W.H. Auden’s quiet, personal pursuit of kindness and honor.

On the dueling propagandists of Kiev and Moscow.

“And yet we live still in Cheney’s world. All around us are the consequences of those decisions.”

A physician reports on his own catastrophic injury.

On Benjamin Murmelstein, the head of the council of elders at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Rethinking Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

A political history of Donald Rumsfeld.

On art and dead bodies.

The economics of climate change and the end of humanity.

How Norman Mailer and other writers wanted to go out.