Politics

United States International Human Rights Climate Change Election 2024

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

Elaine Blair

Far from the Seventies

Two memoirs by women remembering their youthful relationships with older men complicate the definition and implications of “consent.”

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

Diane Ravitch

‘Their Kind of Indoctrination’

For a range of far-right activists, Trump’s second term will be a chance to discipline public schools—and ultimately defund them.

January 11, 2025

David Cole

Free Speech for TikTok?

As the Supreme Court decides whether to let the US ban a hugely popular social media platform, it can either learn from its earlier mistakes or repeat them.

January 8, 2025

Stefan Tarnowski

Syria: The Prison Gates Thrown Open

The Assad regime’s prisons were some of the worst in the world: sites of isolation, humiliation, torture, starvation, and sadistic killing on an industrial scale.

December 22, 2024

Jan-Werner Müller

‘Destruction Through Inclusion’

The far right’s ambiguous triumph in recent Austrian elections holds lessons for Europe as a whole.

December 19, 2024

Caitlin L. Chandler

At the Gates of Fortress Europe

The story of Sajjad Mohammedhasan, who sought asylum but received a year in Lithuania’s border prisons.

December 17, 2024

Piper French

The Reunited

The Biden administration has spent years reunifying families separated during Trump’s first term—but as his second approaches, they find themselves vulnerable again.

December 11, 2024