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Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Martha C. Nussbaum

A Peopled Wilderness

We must find new ways to act toward animals in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity.

December 8, 2022 issue

Corey Robin

Empathy & the Economy

The left is still preoccupied with the decades-old debate over which is more important: recognition of our identities or material redistribution. Adam Smith ended that argument before it began.

December 8, 2022 issue

Regina Marler

Uncommon Women

In Andrea Barrett’s stories, female characters with at least one foot in the sciences have to pick sides and contend with radical changes.

December 8, 2022 issue

Peter Canby

The Death Squad Dossier

Decades after Guatemala’s long civil war, a chronicle of government kidnapping and disappearance is bringing former officials to trial. Will there be justice for the victims?

December 8, 2022 issue

Ben Tarnoff

In the Hothouse

If Elon Musk kills Twitter, what will he have killed?

November 11, 2022

Saidiya Hartman

The Hold of Slavery

In the archive of slavery, I encountered a paradox: the recognition of the slave’s humanity and status as a subject extended and intensified servitude and dispossession.

October 24, 2022

David Cole

Equal Protection on the Docket

In its new term, the Supreme Court has chosen to hear several cases that, if overturned, could set efforts to protect minority groups back decades.

October 3, 2022

Mike Jay

The Melancholy of Anatomy

Frederick Ruysch’s exquisitely preserved human and animal body parts were marvels of both art and science in an era when the divide between the two was less clearly drawn than it is now.

December 8, 2022 issue

The Legacy of Occupy Wall Street

An instructor demonstrating how to break free of plastic hand restraints at the Occupy Wall Street occupation of Zuccotti Park, New York, October 9, 2011

Jeff Madrick

A Zuccotti Park Education

The crisis Occupy Wall Street sees is not just economic. It is about fairness and democracy. How could one blame those in their twenties for frustration when they can’t get a job with youth unemployment rates so high while Wall Street doles out enormous bonuses?

October 11, 2011

Text and art by Molly Crabapple

Occupy Memory

A decade ago, a grassroots anticapitalist movement burst on the scene, galvanizing people with its slogan “We are the 99 percent.” It changed me, and many others, but how much did it change the world?

September 16, 2021

David Graeber

Against Economics

The discipline is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

December 5, 2019 issue

Robert Kuttner

The Debt We Shouldn’t Pay

The classical historian Moses Finley said that in the ancient world all revolutionary movements had a single program: “Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.”

May 9, 2013 issue

The Latest

Fara Dabhoiwala

Becoming Amartya Sen

In his memoir Home in the World the pathbreaking economist and moral philosopher looks back on his much-traveled, multicultural childhood, education, and early academic career.

December 8, 2022 issue

Lynn Hunt

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

December 8, 2022 issue

Sara Lipton

The Jewish Authenticity Trap

Dara Horn’s fierce, often insightful cri de coeur presents a strangely selective picture of Jewishness, cropping a rich, messy, diverse, and complex history to fit into a tightly focused frame.

November 24, 2022 issue

Cass R. Sunstein

Accounting for the Human Cost

Applying a cost-benefit analysis to people’s problems may seem “bloodless,” but it can be a corrective to interest group lobbying, ideology, and bias.

November 24, 2022 issue

David Cole

Originalism’s Charade

Two new books make a devastating case against claims that the Constitution should be interpreted on the basis of its purported “original meaning.”

November 24, 2022 issue

Susan Barba

Language of the Field

What hold do wildflowers have on the land, and on our hearts and tongues?

October 26, 2022

Liza Batkin

Controversy

In a case litigating Andy Warhol’s use of a photograph of Prince, the Supreme Court wades into the uncomfortable territory where art criticism and copyright law collide.

October 25, 2022

Bill Keller

Reform or Abolish?

American prisons are often unjust, inhumane, and ineffective at protecting public safety. Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore believe they should be eliminated entirely.

November 3, 2022 issue

Brenda Wineapple

Living in Words

A new biography explores the life and work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote prodigiously about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.

November 3, 2022 issue

Kathryn Hughes

Department of Speculation

A new book on the history of a group of British clairvoyants charged with predicting disasters maintains a scrupulous neutrality as to whether these precognitions were coincidences or supernatural happenings.

November 3, 2022 issue