Ideas

Economics

Trevor Jackson

The Crash Next Time

Can histories of economic crisis provide us with useful lessons?

April 4, 2024 issue

Edward Chancellor

The Naturalist

In a new biography, Friedrich Hayek emerges as a paradoxical figure: a passionate liberal whose most enthusiastic supporters have been conservative.

December 7, 2023 issue

Daniel Immerwahr

Zoning Out

A recent book contends that the global economy has a new geography of special zones, islands, and enclaves that benefit the world’s wealthiest residents.

November 23, 2023 issue

Ben Tarnoff

Ultra Hardcore

If Walter Isaacson’s new book inflates the scale of Elon Musk’s contributions to humanity, it also understates the amount of damage inflicted on actual humans along the way.

January 18, 2024 issue

Daniel J. Kevles

Unreasonable Terms

In Owning the Sun, Alexander Zaitchik shows how American drug companies have exploited government contracts to pursue profit over public interest.

October 5, 2023 issue

Anjan Sundaram, illustrated by John Grund

White Bay

Life under the chemical megafactories of Ingeniero White, Argentina.

May 28, 2023

Bill Spindle

On the Grid in Leisang

With every village in India electrified, the country’s challenge will be to meet growing energy demand with renewable sources. But can it afford to give up fossil fuels?

June 22, 2022

Jonathan Mingle

Reasons for Concern

The IPCC’s latest report, with warnings for supply chains and food security, may be the most suspense-filled document in human history.

March 9, 2022

America’s Housing Crisis

A deteriorating bank-owned house, Moreno Valley, California, August 2008

Francesca Mari

The Housing Vultures

The investors who exploited the 2008 financial crisis are dictating the bailout of this one.

June 11, 2020 issue

Gabriel M. Schivone

America’s Eviction Epidemic

Across the country, millions of people are facing eviction as protections in place for the pandemic have lapsed.

September 16, 2020

Roberta Brandes Gratz

How NYC Is Zoning Out the Human Scale

This is a New York story only for now. Upzonings and transfers of newly created air rights are occurring in cities around the country. When it comes to real estate, New York City may lead the way, but others follow in time.

December 30, 2019

A view from 7 DeKalb Avenue, an apartment tower in Downtown Brooklyn. Eighty percent of its 250 apartments are subsidized units, for which there were 87,754 applications when it opened.

Michael Greenberg

Tenants Under Siege: Inside New York City’s Housing Crisis

New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency. The tide of homelessness is only the most visible symptom.

August 17, 2017 issue

The Latest

Matthew Desmond

A Prophet for the Poor

In order to build a mass movement for economic justice, Reverend William Barber argues, we need to let go of the idea that poverty is an exclusively Black or urban issue.

October 3, 2024 issue

Ben Tarnoff

Venture-Backed Trumpism

Why have right-wing ideas found such an eager audience among tech elites during Biden’s presidency?

September 19, 2024 issue

Jenny Uglow

Worms’ Work

For five thousand years there has been no shortage of uses for silk, from Genghis Khan’s undershirts to nerve repair.

September 19, 2024 issue

Lynn Hunt

In Search of Steady Reform

Fareed Zakaria seeks lessons for the present in various European revolutions, but the “liberal” English and Dutch examples he singles out as exemplary barely qualify as revolutionary at all.

September 19, 2024 issue

Marc Levinson

What Is a Supermarket?

If the FTC blocks the proposed merger of Kroger and Albertsons, will bigger giants of food retailing like Walmart come out as winners?

June 14, 2024

Francisco Cantú

A Legacy of Plunder

In its reexamination of entrenched narratives about the expropriation of Native land, Michael Witgen’s work is changing how Native people are situated in the arc of North American history.

June 20, 2024 issue

Quinn Slobodian

Safe Havens

The UK’s “second empire” of tax-free jurisdictions around the world persists despite the overwhelming evidence that it enables corruption, drains public budgets, and exacerbates inequality.

May 23, 2024 issue

Jason DeParle

Sisyphus on the Street

Tracy Kidder’s portrait of a doctor and his homeless patients offers personhood to people many Americans have trained themselves not to see.

April 4, 2024 issue

Natalie de Souza

The Dark Tangle of Alzheimer’s

Recent breakthroughs in dementia treatments have been hailed as successes, but after decades of disappointing research it is difficult to be optimistic.

February 22, 2024 issue

Kim Phillips-Fein

Conspicuous Destruction

Two new books argue that the private equity industry has created an economic order in which getting rich quickly preempts every other value, undermining companies and evading the law.

October 19, 2023 issue