Evelyn Bowman

In June 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, while congressional investigators and private groups were hunting down “subversive” or merely “objectionable” books and authors in the name of national security, the American Library Association and the Association Book Publishers Council issued a manifesto called “The Freedom to Read.” The document defended free expression […]

Like any other technology, whether nuclear power or the printing press, social media is only as good as the people who use it—and over the past decade, we haven’t exactly used it well. What began as a promising prospect for connecting communities and amplifying new voices has gradually evolved into an engine for sowing upset, […]

In January 2009, I flew to Dubai and got my first taste of what I would come to know as the Terminal of Lost Souls. Dubai International Airport was one of the glitziest in the world—enormous and modern and filled with luxury shops and lounges. But that was only Terminals 1 and 3. Terminal 2 […]

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. Did you miss Diversity Day a few months back? It falls each year on May 21, and is formally designated by the United Nations as “World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.” Personally, […]

No question is more dreadfully pretentious than “What is art?” except possibly “Can you come see my one-person show?” Yet I’ve accepted that at some point in the course of a life, both will need to be answered. Because I’m a writer facing the advent of ChatGPT, the time for the first question is now. […]

Millions of Americans are leaving church, never to return, and it would be easy to think that this will make the country more secular and possibly more liberal. After all, that is what happened in Northern and Western Europe in the 1960s: A younger generation quit going to Anglican, Lutheran, or Catholic churches and embraced […]

My father and mother met in the winter of 1976. I’ve seen photos. There they are, looking as young and untroubled as any two high-school students on a Friday-night date. Not yet parents, not yet weighed down with the responsibility of caring for four children, both are smiling, my father standing behind my mother, who […]

This week, HarperCollins will publish a new work by the conservative intellectual Richard Hanania. Titled The Origins of Woke, it bills itself as the “definitive” account of the rise of identity politics. The book makes the case that contemporary “wokeness” is an ideology that has its origins in—and was in fact created by—changes to the […]

Twenty-five years ago, in What Would Google Do?, I called for the book to be rethought and renovated, digital and connected, so that it could be updated and made searchable, conversational, collaborative, linkable, less expensive to produce, and cheaper to buy. The problem, I said, was that we so revered the book, it had become […]

No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president. But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly […]