Politics

United States International Human Rights Climate Change Election 2024

Are Sheriffs Above the Law?

County sheriffs are useful to the right. They appear regularly as talking heads on conservative media, especially on the subject of immigration. Many vignettes of sheriffs in action are dramatic and alarming. But how representative are they?

October 3, 2024 issue

Ian Johnson

China’s Iconoclast

Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s biography of Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous dissident, doubles as a history of Chinese political thought and activism over the past half-century.

October 3, 2024 issue

E. Tammy Kim

Duterte’s Cruel Tricks

Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing is both a reporter’s notebook and a contemporary political history of the Philippines.

October 3, 2024 issue

Tareq Baconi

Living the Nakba

Two recent memoirs tell the story of generations of Palestinian grief and struggle.

October 3, 2024 issue

Wallace Shawn

The End of a Village

Jonathan Schell’s account of the US military’s destruction of the village of Ben Suc in Vietnam laid bare the problem with many American interventions.

October 3, 2024 issue

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

David Shulman

An ‘Unlawful Presence’

The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal, yet this will do little to reduce the settlers’ savage violence against Palestinians or force Israelis to become conscious of it.

September 19, 2024 issue

Claudio Lomnitz

Mexico: Anatomy of a Mass Murder

Marcela Turati’s account of the massacres in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, is arguably the most thorough piece of investigative journalism yet produced about Mexico’s brutal political economy.

September 19, 2024 issue

Election 2024

Fintan O’Toole

Kamala’s Moment

Kamala Harris’s campaign asks: Who is a normal American now?

September 19, 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

Fintan O’Toole

Trump’s Old News

The debate showed that the former president faces a new danger: not that his lies are outlandish but that they are getting stale.

September 13, 2024

Ian Frazier

Heeeere’s Tim!

Governor and Mrs. Walz break the Democrats’ pattern of seeming to prefer the coasts.

August 13, 2024

Global Migration

Willa Glickman

‘People Are Not a Crisis’

Eric Adams has insisted that his administration is doing its best to house New York’s asylum seekers, but the city’s shortage of shelter space is the result of political choices.

July 23, 2023

Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Emma Ramadan

Exiles

I recognize in these young people—driven from their homes by war, famine, poverty—an unshakable energy called Hope.

July 11, 2023

Aida Alami

The Land of Dust and Plastic

In Almería, the Moroccan and West African migrant workers who sustain the region’s booming agriculture industry find themselves either neglected or persecuted by the state.

June 24, 2023

John Washington

Journey to the North

Javier Zamora’s retelling of the almost lethal three-thousand-mile journey he made from El Salvador to the US as a child gives the experience of migration extraordinary immediacy.

June 8, 2023 issue

The Latest

Ben Rhodes

Gaza, Israel, and the American Left: October 7 One Year Later

October 15, 2024

Laurence H. Tribe

Where Freedom Ends

Law can oppress as easily as it can liberate, and it is the everyday life we lead at our kitchen tables and in our bedrooms that is most dangerously threatened by a return of Trump to power.

November 7, 2024 issue

Zephyr Teachout

Harris’s Chance on Trade

Kamala Harris has a chance to outflank Trump’s rhetoric on tariffs—and lay out her own vision of fair, green, worker-first global commerce.

October 13, 2024

Joost Hiltermann

The Path to Regional War

For more than nine months, Israel and the Iran-led axis of resistance maintained a precarious balance of mutual deterrence. Now that balance has collapsed.

October 11, 2024

Joseph O’Neill

Bring Back the Fight!

In recent weeks, Harris and Walz have replaced a dynamic movement with a meat-and-potatoes campaign. That needs to change.

October 3, 2024

Gabriel Winant

The Making of the Springfield Working Class

Each generation of this country’s workforce has always been urged to detest the next—to come up with its own fantasies of cat-eating immigrants.

September 30, 2024

Ikhtisad Ahmed

A New Chapter for Bangladesh?

When student protesters ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, they not only ended fifteen years of her authoritarian rule but also challenged her party’s self-serving nationalism.

September 28, 2024

Jessica T. Mathews

The Race That Can’t Be Won

A new nuclear arms race is beginning. It will be far more dangerous than the last one.

October 17, 2024 issue

Gary Younge

Scapegoating the Immigrant

In the aftermath of anti-immigrant riots this summer, the British government has refused to confront the root cause of the violence and cracked down on immigration instead.

October 17, 2024 issue