Politics

United States International Human Rights Climate Change

Dismantling Iowa

American higher education is premised on liberal ideals, intended to make young people independent thinkers and capable citizens. What’s happening in Iowa undermines that legacy.

November 2, 2023 issue

Mark Danner

The Grievance Artist

If Trump has a genius, it is his ability to shape, often out of his own self-made follies and recklessness and crimes, a narrative that relentlessly reaffirms his grim story of an us-versus-them America.

November 2, 2023 issue

Timothy Garton Ash

‘Europe Whole and Free’

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Europe looked forward to finally being whole, free, and at peace. Is that vision coming closer or receding?

November 2, 2023 issue

Howard W. French

China’s Foreclosed Possibilities

China’s political and economic development since Mao’s death in 1976 has been widely misunderstood, which makes it hard to assess where the country might be headed under Xi Jinping.

November 2, 2023 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Defying Tribalism

In her new polemic, the philosopher Susan Neiman charges her fellow leftists with intellectual betrayal and calls for a return to universal ideals of justice and humanity.

November 2, 2023 issue

Kim Phillips-Fein

Conspicuous Destruction

Two new books argue that the private equity industry has created an economic order in which getting rich quickly preempts every other value, undermining companies and evading the law.

October 19, 2023 issue

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

Israel and Gaza

Fintan O’Toole

Biden’s Selective Outrage

The rhetorical choice to pair Israel and Ukraine has not created a common moral cause. It has exposed a double standard.

November 14, 2023

Seth Anziska

‘Let Us Not Hurry to Our Doom’

The first Lebanon War helped lay the groundwork for Israel’s escalations of violence in Gaza. Who will heed its warnings?

November 9, 2023

Omer Bartov, Christopher R. Browning, Jane Caplan, Debórah Dwork, Michael Rothberg, et al.

An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory

Appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine.

November 20, 2023

Dahlia Scheindlin

Israel: The Left in Peril

Since October 7, Israel’s left has encountered unprecedented repression. Could its ideas nonetheless point the way forward?

November 12, 2023

Samanth Subramanian

The Weight of One Story

The speakers in Bushra al-Maqtari’s oral history of Yemen’s civil war each narrate only a single incident: the violent death of a family member or friend.

December 21, 2023 issue

Sherrilyn Ifill

How America Ends and Begins Again

Because so much of what we have come to expect of our country is unraveling, we have an opportunity to build it anew.

December 21, 2023 issue

David Shulman

A Bitter Season in the West Bank

The war in Gaza has provided Israeli settlers fresh opportunity and impunity. I see entire villages fleeing in panic.

December 21, 2023 issue

Duncan Hosie

Bad Facts, Bad Law

In a recent Supreme Court oral argument about disarming domestic abusers, originalism itself was put to the test.

November 25, 2023

Ludwika Włodek

Waiting for a New Poland

Five weeks after the opposition won Poland’s legislative elections, its supporters are looking ahead to the country’s future.

November 24, 2023

Sulaiman Khatib

Combatants for Peace

We are a group of former Israeli soldiers and formerly imprisoned Palestinians. Our work is a model for the nonviolent way forward.

November 23, 2023

Omer Bartov, et al.

An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory

Appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine.

November 20, 2023