Politics

United States International Human Rights Climate Change

Where Will We Live?

Three books on the movement, of both humans and wildlife, spurred by climate change illustrate the magnitude of the challenge before us.

October 6, 2022 issue

Linda Greenhouse

A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent

Stephen Breyer’s dissent in the Supreme Court’s Parents Involved case has proved prophetic about the decision’s consequences for racial integration in public schools.

October 6, 2022 issue

David S. Reynolds

Throngs of Unseen People

In the Houses of Their Despair, Terry Alford’s history of spiritualism during the Civil War era, suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

October 6, 2022 issue

James Walton

Doomed to Lucidity

Though Andrew Miller is a master of traditional narrative, he has struggled to escape the formulas of his fiction.

October 6, 2022 issue

Leslie T. Chang

Little Town on the Prairie

Liang Hong’s best-selling account of returning to her home village inspired an outpouring of Chinese nonfiction about the country’s immense social changes.

October 6, 2022 issue

Mark Danner

The Slow-Motion Coup

What has Donald Trump taken from our democracy?

October 6, 2022 issue

Alex de Waal

The Vanishing Point of the Laws of War

Almost all modern famines, including those in Yemen and Tigray, are caused by tactics of war. What would it take to prevent them?

September 11, 2022

Text and art by Molly Crabapple

In the Shadow of Invasion

Across Ukraine, people fight, grieve, sing, skateboard, selfie. “We will think of our pain after victory.”

September 9, 2022

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

Fintan O’Toole

The Two Elizabeths

The queen presided over the death of a British world and yet was enormously successful in keeping alive the monarchy that symbolized it.

October 20, 2022 issue

Darryl Pinckney

‘She Captured All Before Her’

It used to be that people complained how little they knew of Queen Elizabeth. Toward the end, her remoteness was treasured.

October 20, 2022 issue

Jamieson Webster

A Child Is Being Aborted

Psychoanalysis helped me make sense of my desire to have a child. It also exposes the fantasies at the root of the fear of abortion.

September 21, 2022

Sarah Schulman

The Same Problem on Repeat

Monkeypox is now, with Covid-19 and HIV, one of the viruses at the center of American life. Yet even now that preventive treatments for all three exist, the US has failed to help people access them.

September 4, 2022

Steven Simon

These Disunited States

It is time to consider a radical solution to stave off the prospect of political violence and even civil war in the US.

September 22, 2022 issue

Michael D. Gordin

Our Toxic Nuclear Present

Blindness to the aftermath of nuclear detonations has consistently marginalized some of the most traumatized victims of the atomic age.

September 22, 2022 issue

Joshua Hammer

Promise and Disillusion in South Africa

Despite a shift in political power, the country is plagued by racial divisions and economic inequalities.

September 22, 2022 issue

Fintan O’Toole

The Party’s Over

Boris Johnson’s short and flippant dalliance with power will have very long and serious consequences.

September 22, 2022 issue

Laurence H. Tribe

Deconstructing Dobbs

Whether or not one sees the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision as barely concealed theocracy, it fails to provide any coherent legal analysis of why the right to abortion is not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

September 22, 2022 issue

Joshua Leifer

An Uneasy Alliance in Jerusalem

This November’s parliamentary elections will in large part be a referendum on the participation of Palestinian-Arabs as equals to Jews in Israel’s political process.

August 22, 2022