James McAuley A Failure of Imagination The French left has not only abandoned its traditional constituents, it has also been unable to defend a positive vision of the multicultural society that France has become. April 21, 2022 issue
Jackson Lears The Forgotten Crime of War Itself In his new book, Samuel Moyn argues that efforts to humanize war with smarter weaponry or sanctify it with moral cant have obscured the task of making peace the first goal of foreign policy. April 21, 2022 issue
Benjamin Nathans Bureaucrat’s Honor Three memoirs by Trump administration officials reveal the integrity and moral discipline of the so-called deep state in the face of corruption and philistinism. April 21, 2022 issue
David Cole When Rights Went Right Is the American conception of constitutional rights too absolute? April 21, 2022 issue
Fintan O’Toole The Last of Her Kind Angela Merkel emerged from the ruins of the Eastern bloc as a spectacular example of the way the collapse of an old regime might create a much more benign sense of opportunity. April 7, 2022 issue
Fred Kaplan ‘A Bridge Too Far’ Even the most ardent advocates of NATO expansion after the implosion of the USSR realized that it had limits—and one of those limits was Ukraine. April 7, 2022 issue
Jacob Heilbrunn The Hawks Ascending Russia’s war on Ukraine has opened up a new front in Washington’s foreign policy elite, mobilizing veterans of the cold war and Iraq. Especially on the right, a fierce fight is in prospect. March 14, 2022
Howard W. French Slavery, Empire, Memory For nearly two centuries Britain has attempted to minimize the importance of slavery to its economic prosperity. April 7, 2022 issue
Melissa Gira Grant Policing Womanhood For groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, the erosion of abortion rights and trans rights are complementary pathways to building a Christian nation. May 15, 2022
Elizabeth A. Reese Unsteady Ground Native people have known for a long time that in this country, rights—whether to remain, to pray, to vote, or even to live—are impermanent and fickle things, subject to revision by those in power. May 14, 2022
Catherine Coleman Flowers Our Lives in Their Hands If state governments truly cared about the lives of poor women or our children, they wouldn’t poison our water and pollute our air. They can’t be trusted with our bodies. May 13, 2022
Sherrilyn Ifill Stealing the Crown Jewels Justice Alito purports to place the future of abortion in the hands of women voters—despite abetting the disenfranchisement of Black and Latina women. May 12, 2022
Helon Habila Crude Reality Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were confronts the often ignored messiness and violence of oil extraction. July 21, 2022 issue
Verlyn Klinkenborg The Forest’s-Eye View Two new books investigate the ways in which deforestation affects climate change, and climate change affects forests. July 21, 2022 issue
Robert Kuttner Free Markets, Besieged Citizens Why did Democratic presidents embrace an economic credo that annihilated their own public philosophy and its appeal to the electorate? July 21, 2022 issue
Gordon F. Sander Memory Wars in Latvia In Riga, the invasion of Ukraine has revived controversies over Soviet-era monuments and anxieties about Russian expansionism. July 21, 2022 issue
Liza Batkin Ruling by Fear The Supreme Court’s conservative justices paint a dark portrait of society, danger lurking in every shadow, to justify overturning a New York gun control law. June 25, 2022
Bill Spindle On the Grid in Leisang With every village in India electrified, the country’s challenge will be to meet growing energy demand with renewable sources. But can it afford to give up fossil fuels? June 22, 2022
Madeleine Schwartz Generation Mélenchon A new alliance is attempting to revive the French left by bringing candidates from a range of parties under a single banner. June 18, 2022
Duncan Hosie The Remaking of the Second Amendment The Supreme Court’s expanding interpretation of the Second Amendment threatens longstanding democratic authority to enact gun safety measures. June 10, 2022
Sophie Pinkham A Hotter Russia The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that Russia will be a relative winner in climate change, but a new book argues that the country will find itself in trouble. June 23, 2022 issue
James Mann The Birchers & the Trumpers A new biography of Robert Welch traces the origins and history of the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist John Birch Society and, in the process, provides historical perspective on the far-right populism of the Trump era. June 23, 2022 issue