Human Rights

‘Hell, Yes, We Are Subversive’

For all her influence as an activist, intellectual, and writer, Angela Davis has not always been taken as seriously as her peers. Why not?

September 22, 2022 issue

Annie Sparrow

Health Care Under Fire

The fight to protect medical and humanitarian workers is not new, but we are running out of time before it becomes futile.

June 23, 2022 issue

Joshua Leifer

An Uneasy Alliance in Jerusalem

This November’s parliamentary elections will in large part be a referendum on the participation of Palestinian-Arabs as equals to Jews in Israel’s political process.

August 22, 2022

Scott W. Stern

Dire Straits

Toxic Debt, Josiah Rector’s history of Detroit’s struggles for clean air and water, argues that municipal debt and austerity have furthered an ongoing environmental catastrophe.

June 23, 2022 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Our Hypocrisy on War Crimes

The US’s history of moral evasiveness around wartime atrocities undermines the very institution that might eventually bring Putin and his subordinates to justice: the International Criminal Court.

May 26, 2022 issue

David S. Reynolds

In the Shadow of Slavery

Merging memoir, travelogue, and history, Clint Smith evokes the horrors of slavery.

February 24, 2022 issue

David Cole

Let the Decision Stand

Every argument against Roe was squarely rejected in the Supreme Court’s 1992 Casey decision, and nothing has changed since then except the composition of the Court.

November 4, 2021 issue

Ursula Lindsey

In the Fire

The Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi fearlessly told unpleasant truths about discrimination against women in Arab countries.

October 21, 2021 issue

Policing and Protest

Eugene Police officer Bo Rankin talking with CAHOOTS coordinator Ben Brubaker and emergency crisis worker Matt Eads, Eugene, Oregon, October 2019

Krithika Varagur

In Place of Police

Armed officers are called to address too many situations in which mental health or social workers would be more human and effective.

September 18, 2020

Jay Caspian Kang

Ball Don’t Lie

Robert Scoop Jackson’s ‘The Game Is Not a Game: The Power, Protest, and Politics of American Sports’

September 24, 2020 issue

White nationalist militia members drawn to the Gettysburg National Military Park by a hoax that an Antifa group would be burning of American flags there, Pennsylvania on July 4, 2020

Richard Kreitner and Rick Perlstein

A Brief History of Dangerous Others

The outside agitator trope has always been, at bottom, a way of putting dissidents in their place.

July 27, 2020

The Latest

Jamieson Webster

A Child Is Being Aborted

Psychoanalysis helped me make sense of my desire to have a child. It also exposes the fantasies at the root of the fear of abortion.

September 21, 2022

Bill McKibben

Where Will We Live?

Three books on the movement, of both humans and wildlife, spurred by climate change illustrate the magnitude of the challenge before us.

October 6, 2022 issue

James Walton

Doomed to Lucidity

Though Andrew Miller is a master of traditional narrative, he has struggled to escape the formulas of his fiction.

October 6, 2022 issue

Alex de Waal

The Vanishing Point of the Laws of War

Almost all modern famines, including those in Yemen and Tigray, are caused by tactics of war. What would it take to prevent them?

September 11, 2022

Sarah Schulman

The Same Problem on Repeat

Monkeypox is now, with Covid-19 and HIV, one of the viruses at the center of American life. Yet even now that preventive treatments for all three exist, the US has failed to help people access them.

September 4, 2022

Michael D. Gordin

Our Toxic Nuclear Present

Blindness to the aftermath of nuclear detonations has consistently marginalized some of the most traumatized victims of the atomic age.

September 22, 2022 issue

Joshua Hammer

Promise and Disillusion in South Africa

Despite a shift in political power, the country is plagued by racial divisions and economic inequalities.

September 22, 2022 issue

Vicente L. Rafael

The Return of the Marcoses

The level of support in the Philippines for Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. cannot be explained by social media disinformation or sheer coercion alone.

July 21, 2022

Ursula Lindsey

A Painful In-Betweenness

Syrian novelists attempt to balance the obligation to not let the world forget what happened in their country with their doubts that telling stories of the war will make a difference to its victims.

July 21, 2022 issue

Paisley Currah

What Sex Does

For transgender people in the United States, the sheer number of institutions with discrete authority to define sex ensnares us in Kafkaesque contradictions.

May 27, 2022