Politics

United States International Human Rights Climate Change

A Failure of Imagination

The French left has not only abandoned its traditional constituents, it has also been unable to defend a positive vision of the multicultural society that France has become.

April 21, 2022 issue

Jackson Lears

The Forgotten Crime of War Itself

In his new book, Samuel Moyn argues that efforts to humanize war with smarter weaponry or sanctify it with moral cant have obscured the task of making peace the first goal of foreign policy.

April 21, 2022 issue

Benjamin Nathans

Bureaucrat’s Honor

Three memoirs by Trump administration officials reveal the integrity and moral discipline of the so-called deep state in the face of corruption and philistinism.

April 21, 2022 issue

David Cole

When Rights Went Right

Is the American conception of constitutional rights too absolute?

April 21, 2022 issue

Fintan O’Toole

The Last of Her Kind

Angela Merkel emerged from the ruins of the Eastern bloc as a spectacular example of the way the collapse of an old regime might create a much more benign sense of opportunity.

April 7, 2022 issue

Fred Kaplan

‘A Bridge Too Far’

Even the most ardent advocates of NATO expansion after the implosion of the USSR realized that it had limits—and one of those limits was Ukraine.

April 7, 2022 issue

Jacob Heilbrunn

The Hawks Ascending

Russia’s war on Ukraine has opened up a new front in Washington’s foreign policy elite, mobilizing veterans of the cold war and Iraq. Especially on the right, a fierce fight is in prospect.

March 14, 2022

Howard W. French

Slavery, Empire, Memory

For nearly two centuries Britain has attempted to minimize the importance of slavery to its economic prosperity.

April 7, 2022 issue

The End of ‘Roe’?

Melissa Gira Grant

Policing Womanhood

For groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, the erosion of abortion rights and trans rights are complementary pathways to building a Christian nation.

May 15, 2022

Elizabeth A. Reese

Unsteady Ground

Native people have known for a long time that in this country, rights—whether to remain, to pray, to vote, or even to live—are impermanent and fickle things, subject to revision by those in power.

May 14, 2022

Catherine Coleman Flowers

Our Lives in Their Hands

If state governments truly cared about the lives of poor women or our children, they wouldn’t poison our water and pollute our air. They can’t be trusted with our bodies.

May 13, 2022

Sherrilyn Ifill

Stealing the Crown Jewels

Justice Alito purports to place the future of abortion in the hands of women voters—despite abetting the disenfranchisement of Black and Latina women.

May 12, 2022

Helon Habila

Crude Reality

Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were confronts the often ignored messiness and violence of oil extraction.

July 21, 2022 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

The Forest’s-Eye View

Two new books investigate the ways in which deforestation affects climate change, and climate change affects forests.

July 21, 2022 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

Gordon F. Sander

Memory Wars in Latvia

In Riga, the invasion of Ukraine has revived controversies over Soviet-era monuments and anxieties about Russian expansionism.

July 21, 2022 issue

Liza Batkin

Ruling by Fear

The Supreme Court’s conservative justices paint a dark portrait of society, danger lurking in every shadow, to justify overturning a New York gun control law.

June 25, 2022

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

Madeleine Schwartz

Generation Mélenchon

A new alliance is attempting to revive the French left by bringing candidates from a range of parties under a single banner.

June 18, 2022

Duncan Hosie

The Remaking of the Second Amendment

The Supreme Court’s expanding interpretation of the Second Amendment threatens longstanding democratic authority to enact gun safety measures.

June 10, 2022

Sophie Pinkham

A Hotter Russia

The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that Russia will be a relative winner in climate change, but a new book argues that the country will find itself in trouble.

June 23, 2022 issue

James Mann

The Birchers & the Trumpers

A new biography of Robert Welch traces the origins and history of the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist John Birch Society and, in the process, provides historical perspective on the far-right populism of the Trump era.

June 23, 2022 issue