Gal Beckerman

The Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov was a zealous defender of all human rights, but there was one he spoke about as a first among equals: the right to emigrate. This was, he wrote, “an essential condition of spiritual freedom.” The […]

The story of Alexei Navalny is not funny. How could it be? We know how it ends. The Russian dissident died under mysterious circumstances in a prison camp above the Arctic Circle last February, alone, still fighting. He had already

Since last October 7, I have averted my eyes from social media at many moments, and not for the obvious reasons—not because a virtual yelling match had reached a painfully high pitch or become a crude display of mental entrenchment.

At a rally in Tel Aviv this past summer held by Israel’s beleaguered left, Yuval Noah Harari appeared as the keynote speaker. He began his speech not with the latest developments from Gaza or a grand pronouncement about how the

The obsession that would overtake Craig Unger’s life, get him labeled a member of the “tinfoil-hat brigade,” and nearly destroy his career as an investigative reporter took root on an April morning in 1991. Scanning The New York Times and

Not long after Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point was published, in the winter of 2000, it had a tipping point of its own. His first book took up residence on the New York Times best-seller list for an unbelievable eight

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Three now-infamous paragraphs from Susan Sontag stung like a slap to the face in the disorienting days that followed the 9/11 attacks. Asked

With a name that sounds like something a parent would slowly mouth to their infant, NaNoWriMo is an annual “challenge” in which many thousands of seemingly well-adjusted people decide to write a novel in a month. “Do I need something