Politics

United States International Human Rights Climate Change

The Creation of Nigeria

Britain’s consolidation of Nigeria as a single colony has been the source of most of the major political conflicts that have roiled the country since independence.

June 8, 2023 issue

Tash Aw

Personal Histories

Drawing from sources both archival and personal, the photographer Sim Chi Yin explores the legacy of British colonialism and conflict in Malaya.

May 11, 2023 issue

Jacqueline Rose

Fascism Plucking the Strings

C.P. Taylor’s deeply disturbing play Good asks if an ordinary individual can be relied on to resist the blandishments of an evil regime.

May 11, 2023 issue

Elaine Blair

The Limits of Language

In the newsroom and in Hollywood, a new vernacular is emerging to describe sexual assault.

May 25, 2023 issue

Willa Glickman

The Fight for Fair Wages

America’s lowest-paid workers are at a breaking point, and grassroots labor organizing may offer the only way out.

May 25, 2023 issue

Judith Levine

Name the Lost!

A memorial in Green-Wood Cemetery for New Yorkers who have died of Covid-19 is intended to be ephemeral.

May 21, 2023

Rachael Bedard

A Culture of Repression and Neglect

The inaction of Jordan Neely’s fellow passengers underscores the mistrust pervading our public spaces. We see a city operating with the fearful logic of a jail.

May 11, 2023

Fintan O’Toole

Golden Coats, Sacred Spoons

Most of the coronation ceremony is a series of relatively recent inventions, a charade of historical continuity.

May 7, 2023

Fintan O’Toole on Donald Trump

Fintan O’Toole

Saboteur in Chief

When you want to discredit government itself, obliviousness and ineptitude are their own rewards.

December 6, 2018 issue

Fintan O’Toole

The King and I

Trump cannot function as a dictator, but he thinks and behaves like one. And this contradiction of an authoritarian in a democratic system turns upside down one of the central qualities of dictatorship: the monopoly on predictability.

March 21, 2019 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Trump’s Show Trial

Republican senators are now quite openly behaving as courtiers. It is impertinent for courtiers even to go through the motions of putting the monarch on trial.

February 27, 2020 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Dress Rehearsal

Trump’s attempt almost two years ago to undermine the 2020 election reads today like a blueprint drawn for a future autocrat.

January 19, 2023 issue

The Latest

Andrea R. Flores

Asylum in Limbo

Like the Trump-era policy it replaces, Biden’s new asylum ban suggests that certain migrants are less deserving of humanitarian protection than others.

May 28, 2023

Anjan Sundaram

White Bay

Life under the chemical megafactories of Ingeniero White, Argentina.

May 28, 2023

Jon Allsop

Extinction Coalition

After making its name with disruptive direct actions, the climate movement Extinction Rebellion is on a path to go mainstream.

April 27, 2023

Piper French

A Housing Crisis in Paradise

Two residential developments in Marin County have, for different reasons, met with resistance from their communities. What can they tell us about the way out of California’s housing emergency?

April 26, 2023

Joseph O’Neill

Embracing Defeat

Faced with a coordinated right-wing legal assault, the Democratic Party has responded with a passivity that borders on surrender.

April 23, 2023

Carol Schaeffer

‘A Book is a Quiet Weapon’

Across Ukraine, libraries devastated by the war are culling their collections of Russian-language books and Russian literature.

April 21, 2023

Timothy Garton Ash

Yearning to Breathe Free

The opening of the Berlin Wall was a one-in-a-million piece of historical luck.

May 11, 2023 issue

Jonathan Mingle

Après-Ski

Climate change is rendering the winter season shorter, warmer, and more erratic. What are we losing beyond the alpine resort?

May 11, 2023 issue

David Cole

An Abortion Drug Tests the Supreme Court

How the justices resolve a case over the FDA’s longstanding approval of mifepristone will reveal whether they rule by personal ideology or by judicial restraint.

April 18, 2023

Lawrence Lessig

Making a Constitutional Convention Safe for Democracy

Conservatives in the US are close to making Congress call a convention for proposing constitutional amendments. How could it be protected for majority rule?

April 17, 2023