Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge,…
Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He has published 22 novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his Mars trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages…
Ben Mezrich has created his own highly addictive genre of nonfiction, chronicling the amazing stories of young geniuses making tons of money on the edge of impossibility, ethics, and morality.
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and, although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, …
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (Russian: Михаил Булгаков) was a Russian writer, medical doctor, and playwright. His novel The Master and Margarita, published posthumously, has been called one of th…
Judith Butler is an American philosopher, feminist, and queer theorist whose work has profoundly shaped gender studies, political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. Born in Cleve…
Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. He went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but …
Genevan philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau held that society usually corrupts the essentially good individual; his works include The Social Contract and Émile (both 1762).
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Her brill…
Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynami…
Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defini…
Richard Norton Smith is an American historian and author, specializing in U.S. presidents and other political figures. In the past, he worked as a freelance writer for The Washington Post, and worked …
Carl Schmitt's early career as an academic lawyer falls into the last years of the Wilhelmine Empire. (See for Schmitt's life and career: Bendersky 1983; Balakrishnan 2000; Mehring 2009.) But Schmitt …
Elaine Weiss has served as the national coordinator for the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education (BBA) since 2011, in which capacity she works with three co-chairs, a high-level task force, and multi…
Emilio Gentile (born 1946 in Bojano) is an Italian historian specializing in the ideology and culture of fascism. Gentile is considered one of Italy's foremost cultural historians of fascist ideology.…
Enzo Traverso is an Italian scholar of European intellectual history. He is the author of several books on critical theory, the Holocaust, Marxism, memory, totalitarianism, revolution, and contemporar…
Ted Genoways is an acclaimed journalist and author of The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food. A contributing editor at Mother Jones, the New Republic, and Pacific Standard, he is the winne…
Many works, including Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life; he won t…
Andrew Ross Sorkin is The New York Timess chief mergers and acquisitions reporter and a columnist. Mr. Sorkin, a leading voice about Wall Street and corporate America, is also the editor of DealBook (…