Politics

United States International Human Rights Climate Change

Guatemala: Democracy Imperiled

Bernardo Arévalo’s inauguration last year as president of Guatemala symbolized the revival of democracy in a notoriously corrupt country. A concerted effort by obstructionist elites now threatens to oust him on specious grounds—and bring repression back.

February 13, 2025 issue

David Shulman

A Deadly Apathy

A blank indifference to cruelty and atrocity as a normative mode of waging war has infected Israel’s collective conscience.

January 16, 2025 issue

Rachel Donadio

Unsinkable Paris

The spirit of celebration on the streets of Paris during the Olympics was all the more meaningful to those of us who had lived through so many of the city’s darker recent chapters.

January 16, 2025 issue

Ursula Lindsey

Joy and Apprehension in Syria

There is widespread relief after Assad’s fall, though no one is more aware than Syrians themselves of the dangers and challenges that await them.

January 16, 2025 issue

Joshua Hammer

Making Germany Hate Again

In Look Away, Jacob Kushner draws a disturbing portrait of the white supremacist subculture that took hold across eastern Germany in the 1990s and now is making gains at the ballot box.

December 19, 2024 issue

Charles Glass

Lebanon’s Year of Living Ambiguously

After the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah decided to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political and economic plight.

December 19, 2024 issue

David Cole

Gender-Affirming Care & the Courts

The Supreme Court will rule this term on whether a Tennessee law denying minors treatment for gender dysphoria discriminates on the basis of sex.

December 19, 2024 issue

Fintan O’Toole

The Second Coming

Disinhibition will be the order of the day in Donald Trump’s America.

December 5, 2024 issue

Circling the Drain

Andrew O’Hagan

The Darkroom of Propaganda

“It now shows in the lower depths of the Internet as well as on talk radio shows and a hundred perfidious podcasts, where the sleep of reason becomes a populist mania, and hostility a kind of sport.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Linda Greenhouse

Trump at the Supreme Court

“The amateurish nature of many of the first Trump administration’s encounters with the Supreme Court is highly likely to be replaced by a more disciplined and strategic approach.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Ben Tarnoff

Antisystemic Times

“Large numbers of Americans have come to believe that their body politic is severely diseased. In Trump, they have found a man ruthless enough to inflict the remedy.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Christine Henneberg

On Abortion Rights

“I, like physicians in Texas, Idaho, and elsewhere, will be forced to turn patients away—not for medical reasons, not because I am not trained to help them, but because of moral decrees handed down by politicians.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Aryeh Neier

The Rise of Authoritarianism

The triumph of Trump and Trumpism in the United States will add legitimacy to the rule of autocrats all over the world.

December 19, 2024 issue

Wesley Lowery

The Task of the Journalist

“Our highest calling is not short-term persuasion or immediate influence but diligent documentation.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Susan Neiman

Nemesis

“Will workers be served by a president who openly praises union-busters? Of course not, but Trump’s promise was to be their retribution, not to solve their problems.”

December 19, 2024 issue

Michael Hofmann

Words Without Consequences

“How can one not see through something so threadbare, so self-serving, so randomly and contemptuously thrown out by the self-adoring crooner?”

December 19, 2024 issue

Election 2024: A Symposium

Jonathan Lethem

The Forty-Fourth Year of the Reagan Administration

What would it sound like if the Democratic elite said the quiet part out loud?

November 7, 2024 issue

Anne Enright

Words Not Said

On the undecided voter

November 7, 2024 issue

Matthew Desmond

How to Solve the Housing Crisis

What the next president can do

November 7, 2024 issue

Pankaj Mishra

The Flailing Superpower

The spectacle of America on the global stage

November 7, 2024 issue

Jacqueline Rose

Antigone’s Law

Who can make the world a better place?

November 7, 2024 issue

Elaine Blair

Stop Infantilizing Moderates!

Democrats need a stronger message for the uncommitted voter.

November 7, 2024 issue

Marilynne Robinson

‘The Joke Turns Fearful Earnest’

On taking democracy seriously

November 7, 2024 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Silent Spring

Why aren’t the candidates talking about climate change?

November 7, 2024 issue

Susan Faludi

Laugh-In

On the joyful Kamala Harris and the mirthless Donald Trump

November 7, 2024 issue

Mark Lilla

Another Change Election

On the need to preserve our institutions

November 7, 2024 issue

The Latest

a conversation with Sherrilyn Ifill, Pamela Karlan, and Laurence H. Tribe, moderated by Fintan O’Toole

Constitutional Crises

April 26, 2025

Sean Wilentz

Vance’s Junk History

J.D. Vance has cited Andrew Jackson to justify the idea that a president can disobey the federal judiciary’s rulings. The historical record says no such thing.

April 25, 2025

Noah Feldman

The Last Bulwark

The fate of our democracy today depends on the judiciary’s commitments to liberty, constitutionalism, and legality.

May 15, 2025 issue

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Justice for Chagos?

Decades after the Pacific island colony’s inhabitants were forcibly deported to accommodate an American military base, the ICJ has ruled that they be allowed to return. But is international law sufficient to bring them justice?

May 15, 2025 issue

Joshua Leifer

Reoccupying Gaza

A consensus has by now emerged among Israel’s leaders that the country’s army will take direct, long-term control of the Strip—and attempt to expel its inhabitants.

April 23, 2025

Nic Johnson

Breaking the Conveyor Belt

Motivated perhaps above all by culture-war grievance, in the past month Donald Trump has tried to radically reshape a century-old system of global trade.

April 20, 2025

David Cole

Why Harvard Defied Him

How the university fares in its struggle with Donald Trump may well determine the future of academic freedom in the United States.

April 19, 2025

Nawal Arjini and Willa Glickman

The President of Brooklyn

The saga of Eric Adams’s mayoralty has come to epitomize the spirit of Trump’s second term—from its ethos of aggrieved narcissism to its punitive approach toward the vulnerable.

April 17, 2025