Early in her new book, “At the Existentialist Café,” Sarah Bakewell admits that her beloved existentialism has seen better days. Once the preferred method for making sense of a godless world of moral ...

For anyone coming of age in the 1960s, existentialism was an alluring but oddly woolly business. It seemed to require being deadly serious about spending lots of time drinking, dancing, smoking and ...

At the Existentialist Café takes us from the birth of existentialism to the deaths of its originators, exploring the lives of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and ...

We've all had those late night-text conversations that seem to plumb the depths of the universe, right? The ones that either plunge you into a pit of despair or make you feel like you've figured out ...

Discussions about God’s existence usually consider three points of view: the theistic (some kind of higher power or powers exists), atheistic (the opposite), or agnostic (not sure). Let me propose a ...

If scrolling through social media has ever sent you into an existentialist tailspin, you’re not alone. Let’s face it—we’ve all felt the awful twinge of FOMO. April Eileen Henry, a Los Angeles artist ...

WILKES-BARRE — What kind of novel would a libertarian existentialist philosophy teacher write? If you guessed “one about Buddhism,” you wouldn’t be too far off — and maybe a bit prescient. If you ...

In a post last week I considered the possible influence of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher on a key sequence of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. I failed to acknowledge, though, how this sequence ...

THE SHORT CUT (302 pp.)—Ennio Flaiano—Pellegrini & Cudahy ($3). Rotting corpses, noisome reminders of Mussolini’s sordid victory, littered the Ethiopian bush. It was treacherous country at best, full ...

We live in a partisan age, and our news habits can reinforce our own perspectives. Consider this an effort to broaden our collective outlook with essays beyond the range of our typical selections.

In a crude wooden hut 20 miles from Paris, agents of the Paris police studied a fantastic corpse. It was the bloated body of a white man, but it had turned a ghastly, gleaming black. On each side of ...