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In his new book, Richard Landes argues that in addition to the obvious End Timers many secular movements—the French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism—can be better understood as millennialist or apocalyptic.

The religious right is trying to tell them something, and, for once, they’re not listening.

The Tea Party debate.

Several days ago I was in the car, listening to songs shuffled at random. Just as I pulled into the parking lot I heard the opening lines of “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer,” recorded at one of Cash’s famous 1968 Folsom Prison shows. Transfixed, I sat and listened to the whole seven-minute song, which tells the story of a man who, after winning a heart-pounding spike-driving competition against a machine, lays down his hammer and dies. It is a great story that may be read as a warning to those who equate scientific and technological advance with human progress. What I’d like to ask is this: do stories point us, in even the smallest of ways, toward anything that might be described as the truth?

If there is any communal rite of passage at Burning Man, it is the Temple Burn on Sunday night, the event’s finale. Not everyone comes out for this event; some would rather dance to techno music or chat up a neighbor on the next bar stool instead of joining tens of thousands of Burners sitting on the ground quietly waiting for the temple to burn down, taking all their messages and their pain—they hope—with it.

After three attacks on LGBT people, a vigil in Salt Lake City.

But 9/11 has changed the kind of art we’re interested in.

Where in the world did Perry’s analogy come from?

Lower Manhattan has long been a proving ground for American ideals.