Politics

United States

The Lingering Delusion

Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days succeeds at least in distilling the evasions and weaknesses of the modern Democratic Party.

November 20, 2025 issue

Susan Neiman

Where Wokeness Went Wrong

Symbolic struggles cannot be a force of resistance to the Trump administration.

December 4, 2025 issue

Mark Lilla

Storm Warnings

The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.

November 6, 2025 issue

Cora Currier

Pervasive Impunity

Richard Beck’s Homeland charts how four presidential administrations managed to evade moral responsibility for the “war on terror” by hiding behind legality and process.

November 6, 2025 issue

Caroline Moorehead

After Resettlement

How has a group of Liberian refugees, resettled in the US nearly twenty-five years ago after fleeing civil war, fared in a country that has changed vastly since admitting them?

August 21, 2025 issue

Gordon F. Sander

Not for Sale

President Trump’s threats to seize Greenland have caused consternation and fear among Danes and Greenlanders alike.

December 4, 2025 issue

Robert Sullivan

The Third Sovereign

If there is hope for the earth, it will depend in part on acknowledging indigenous sovereignty in the face of insatiable resource extraction.

December 4, 2025 issue

Jay Neugeboren

The Homeless We Don’t See

As housing costs have risen and affordable housing remains in short supply, even Americans with full-time jobs are experiencing homelessness.

October 23, 2025 issue

Over Abundance

Trevor Jackson

How to Blow Up a Planet

For liberal supporters of the “abundance” movement, deregulation is crucial to solving climate and economic crises. Their critics argue something more confrontational is needed.

September 25, 2025 issue

Robert Kuttner

Free Markets, Besieged Citizens

Why did Democratic presidents embrace an economic credo that annihilated their own public philosophy and its appeal to the electorate?

July 21, 2022 issue

Thomas Frank

What’s the Matter with Liberals?

“Once again, the ‘party of the people’ chose to sacrifice the liberal economic policies that used to connect them to such voters on the altar of centrism.”

May 12, 2005 issue

Lars-Erik Nelson

Watch Out, Democrats!

“Instead of personal prosperity, traditional working-class voters get condescending lectures about the virtues of free trade, often couched in language suggesting that anyone who doubts the benefits of globalization is a knuckle-dragging mouth-breather.”

July 20, 2000 issue

“To Serve and Protect”

Peter C. Baker

A Legacy of Torture in Chicago

“Chicago has a police torture problem. The exact size of this problem is not known and perhaps never will be. What is known for sure is that between 1972 and 1991 at least 125 black Chicagoans were tortured by police officers in the Area 2 precinct building on the city’s predominantly black South Side.”

July 2, 2020 issue

I.F. Stone

Fabricated Evidence in the Kent State Killings

“After the report on the Kent State killings by the Ohio special Portage County grand jury, law officers may feel as free to shoot white students as they do black.”

December 3, 1970 issue

John Gregory Dunne

Law & Disorder in Los Angeles

“This is a public, surveys have suggested, that believes crime to be the number-one domestic political issue, want strong law enforcement, and would not and often did not make much of a fuss about police brutality as long as it was kept out of sight, out of mind.”

October 10, 1991 issue

Annette Gordon-Reed

The Problem of Police Powers for People Living While Black

There is no doubt that our country’s troubled racial history has helped shape current attitudes. It should not surprise us that the police more often apply that discretion to black people in degrading and dangerous ways.

June 13, 2020