Politics

United States International Human Rights Climate Change

Why Aren’t Cops Held to Account?

Decades of Supreme Court decisions have converted qualified immunity from a commonsense rule into a powerful doctrine that deprives people injured by police misconduct of recourse.

September 21, 2023 issue

Ariel Dorfman

Defending Allende

The question of where Chile’s true identity lies becomes ever more pressing as the fiftieth anniversary of Pinochet’s coup approaches.

September 21, 2023 issue

Osita Nwanevu

The Life of the Party

In his latest book, Michael Kazin argues that the Democrats have long sought to build a “moral capitalism.” Have they ever succeeded?

September 21, 2023 issue

Eric Foner

Seeing Was Not Believing

A new book identifies the 1968 Democratic convention as the moment when broad public regard for the news media gave way to widespread distrust, and American divisiveness took off.

September 21, 2023 issue

Laurence H. Tribe

Constrain the Court—Without Crippling It

Critics of the Supreme Court think it has lost its claim to legitimacy. But proposals for reforming it must strike a balance with preserving its power and independence, which remain essential to our constitutional system.

August 17, 2023 issue

Ratik Asokan

The Long Struggle of India’s Sanitation Workers

For centuries, the caste system has forced Dalit laborers to handle human waste in deadly conditions. Now they are rising up.

August 24, 2023

Fintan O’Toole

A Frame-Up in Georgia

By launching a campaign of lies and harassment against an innocent Georgia election worker, the Trump team proved how much cruelty it was willing to inflict on ordinary people who stood in its way.

August 17, 2023

Kristin Ross

The War of the Worlds in France

In the past two years Les Soulèvements de la Terre, a network of ecological activists and groups, has used direct confrontations with polluters and developers to threaten industrial agriculture’s monopoly on the French countryside.

August 13, 2023

Law & Justice

David Cole

Surprising Consensus at the Supreme Court

With narrow rulings in many of its most controversial cases, the Court defied predictions of a sharp turn to the right.

August 19, 2021 issue

Jenny Uglow

Contagious Constitutions

Linda Colley shows in her new book that written constitutions developed both as a means of shoring up entrenched rulers and of turning successful rebellions into legitimate governments.

June 10, 2021 issue

Ankush Khardori

Merrick Garland’s Moderation to Excess

As attorney general, he is the United States’ top law enforcement officer. But is he enforcing enough?

July 15, 2021

Jed S. Rakoff

Sentenced by Algorithm

Computer programs used to predict recidivism and determine prison terms have a high error rate, a secret design, and a demonstrable racial bias.

June 10, 2021 issue

The Latest

Suzy Hansen

Twenty Years of Outsourced War

In Uncertain Ground, Phil Klay sets out to determine what twenty-first-century US foreign policy has done to the cocksure American mind.

October 19, 2023 issue

Susan Neiman

Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire

Germans’ efforts to confront their country’s criminal history and to root out antisemitism have shifted from vigilance to a philosemitic McCarthyism that threatens their rich cultural life.

October 19, 2023 issue

David Shulman

Heading Toward a Second Nakba

Nathan Thrall argues that the accident in which Abed Salama’s son died was a predictable, even inevitable, outcome of the Israeli occupation in its quotidian forms.

October 19, 2023 issue

Gabriel Winant

Eight and Skate

Today’s iteration of the United Auto Workers—now on a decisive strike—is both a renewal of an old tradition and a new creation.

September 23, 2023

Jérôme Tubiana

‘We Fight Today, We’ll Wrestle Tomorrow’

Imported to the capital by communities displaced in the country’s wars, wrestling has become one of Sudan’s political battlegrounds.

September 22, 2023

Miriam Pensack

The Specialist

Even as he appeals a recent money-laundering conviction, Panama’s former president has been planning a political comeback.

September 18, 2023

Meg Weeks

‘The Base of the Labor Pyramid’

Long exploited and denied basic rights, Brazil’s domestic workers continue to organize against an entitled elite.

September 17, 2023

Tim Judah

Ukraine’s New Normal

Away from the front, life appears to be the same, but the country has undergone profound changes.

October 5, 2023 issue

Noah Feldman

The Court’s Conservative Constitutional Revolution

The bloc of conservative justices on the Supreme Court have dismantled many of the legal precedents on their hit list. What’s in store for the new term?

October 5, 2023 issue