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The opioid epidemic is usually seen as a supply problem. If we can interdict the supply of prescription opioids, the thinking goes, we can stanch the epidemic. But that is unlikely to work for two reasons. First, this is no longer mainly an epidemic of prescription drugs but of street drugs. And second, it creates an onerous obstacle for doctors and outpatients who require pain treatment.

The Other Constitutions

John Paul Stevens

‘51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law’ by Jeffrey Sutton

Music Without a Destination

Matthew Aucoin

‘Debussy: A Painter in Sound’ by Stephen Walsh

‘This Is a Reality, Not a Threat’

Christopher Clark

Predicting future wars—both who will fight them and how they will be fought—has always been a hit-and-miss affair.

A Very Grim Forecast

Bill McKibben

On climate change, we’re running out of options, and we’re running out of decades.

Romanticism’s Unruly Hero

Jed Perl

Delacroix’s art remains a gorgeous enigma.

The Crash That Failed

Robert Kuttner

Adam Tooze’s ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World’

Writing as Fast as Reality

Yasmine El Rashidi

A master craftsperson, Ali Smith seems to be completely liberated from ideas of what a novelist should be or do.

The Sins of Celibacy

Alexander Stille

The modern Catholic Church has failed to grasp what its founders understood quite well.

‘This Is a Reality, Not a Threat’

Christopher Clark

Predicting future wars—both who will fight them and how they will be fought—has always been a hit-and-miss affair.

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MLK: What We Lost

Annette Gordon-Reed

Figures like Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks have now become “safe” in ways they never were when they were operating at the height of their powers.

The Concrete Jungle

David Quammen

Evolution is still happening, sometimes briskly, and in response to the single greatest agent of environmental change on the planet: us.

‘Inventing New Ways to Be’

Mark Ford

Adrienne Rich’s books reveal an astonishing power not only to capture the shifting spirit of the times but to anticipate the dilemmas of the future

Fighting to Vote

Michael Tomasky

‘The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present’ by Allan J. Lichtman

Who Will Speak for the Democrats?

Michael Hirsh

Nancy Pelosi seems confident that she can overcome the resistance and keep her unruly party in line as she has done in the past.

How Republicans Became Anti-Choice

Sue Halpern

It is impossible to understand American politics of the past half-century without taking abortion into account.

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The Suffocation of Democracy

Christopher R. Browning

No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics.

An Explosion of Pure Fact

Adam Thirlwell

In ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ Döblin was following his basic crazed principle: every element of a novel should be pursued further than it had been before.

The Autocracy App

Jacob Weisberg

The growing consensus is that Facebook’s power needs checking. Fewer agree on what its greatest harms are—and still fewer on what to do about them.

Catching Up to Pauli Murray

Drew Gilpin Faust

Her words and actions on behalf of African-Americans and women propelled two of the most significant social movements of the twentieth century

Matters of Tolerance

James Gleick

‘The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World’ by Simon Winchester

An Enduring Shame

Heather Ann Thompson

‘The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women’ by Scott Wasserman Stern

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