Corey Robin

The distinction between “Athens and Jerusalem” plays a large role in literature (Matthew Arnold and Eric Auerbach), political theory (Leo Strauss), and philosophy (Hegel, Nietzsche).

If you’re roughly of my generation or older, you might remember Saul Bellow’s telling a New York Times journalist, back in the 1980s, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?

Three weeks after Jane Doe was gang raped at a frat house at Cornell, she phoned one of her alleged rapists, sophomore Winston Lee.

At the New York Review of Books, I talk with the novelist Karan Mahajan about literature and politics.

Over the last 24 hours, it’s become clear that the “statement” Jane Doe gave to the Cornell University police, which was then delivered to the Tompkins County District Attorney, was not anywhere close to the initial statement she gave to the police.

In all the conversation about Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay, few people have focused on what I think is the real lunacy at the heart of that story.

Mayor Mamdani has created a new program—70,000 free tickets, every year, for students, citizens, residents, workers, immigrants, toddlers, grandparents, homeless people, anyone and everyone who lives in the city, to go to the Metropolitan Opera.

One conclusion from the Nikole Hannah-Jones piece, which I loved, that I hope everyone on the left can agree upon is that whatever you think of Hannah-Jones, her politics, or the piece itself (and, please, I beg of you, don’t use this post as an opportuni…

The writings and posts about 9/11 in the last 48 hours tend to follow an arc.

One of the things that Leo Strauss does quite well, as a writer, which I never really noticed before, is that when he rehearses the arguments of others—what we today would call a lit review—he provides a genuine sense of drama to his account.

Two of my favorite historians, Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman, are teaching a course, starting in mid-September, at the New York City DSA Academy—yes, an actual socialist school for the left!

Gloria Steinem, who just died, said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”

The following was from the introduction I’m writing with Alex Gourevitch for a new translation of Marx’s On the Jewish Question.

In a recent post, Jodi Dean offers the most radical analysis of AI that I’ve seen.

It seems like we’ve been going through an epidemic of plagiarism scandals for the last couple of decades.

I don’t have a problem with the idea that what wins in New York City is not the same as what wins in Iowa, that the US is a big country with all kinds of diversity, etc.

Who was the first to come up with the “wages of whiteness” thesis, broadly construed as a theory of how racism works and functions in a hierarchical society?

I hesitate to give this issue any attention, lest it suck out more oxygen than it already has from Abdul El-Sayed’s inspiring campaign and yesterday’s victory in Michigan.