Human Rights

Journey to the North

Javier Zamora’s retelling of the almost lethal three-thousand-mile journey he made from El Salvador to the US as a child gives the experience of migration extraordinary immediacy.

June 8, 2023 issue

Elaine Blair

The Limits of Language

In the newsroom and in Hollywood, a new vernacular is emerging to describe sexual assault.

May 25, 2023 issue

Jean Dykstra

‘Looking Out’

The podcast Ear Hustle and the photographs and writing collected in The San Quentin Project reveal the granular details of prison life without glossing over its violence or obscuring the humanity of incarcerated people.

May 11, 2023 issue

Tash Aw

Personal Histories

Drawing from sources both archival and personal, the photographer Sim Chi Yin explores the legacy of British colonialism and conflict in Malaya.

May 11, 2023 issue

Timothy Garton Ash

Yearning to Breathe Free

The opening of the Berlin Wall was a one-in-a-million piece of historical luck.

May 11, 2023 issue

Sarah Schulman

Red Lights, Blue Lines

Three recent books examine the discrimination and hypocrisy at the heart of policing “vice.”

March 23, 2023 issue

Rachael Bedard

A Culture of Repression and Neglect

The inaction of Jordan Neely’s fellow passengers underscores the mistrust pervading our public spaces. We see a city operating with the fearful logic of a jail.

May 11, 2023

Tareq Baconi

Enforcing Apartheid in the West Bank

After settlers attacked a Palestinian village last week, Israeli politicians called it an outbreak of lawlessness. But the army covered the settlers’ every move.

March 3, 2023

June 4, 1989

Jonathan Mirsky

The Truth About Tiananmen

“The man who tells the truth about what really happened in Beijing will rule China.”

February 8, 2001 issue

Fang Lizhi, translated by Perry Link

The Chinese Amnesia

Under the Chinese Communist policy of “Forgetting History,” about once each decade the true face of history is thoroughly erased from the memory of Chinese society.

September 27, 1990 issue

Francine Prose

Casting a Lifeline

In Ma Jian’s lyrical, unexpectedly humorous novel ‘Beijing Coma,’ the narrator gradually realizes he is in a coma, having been shot in the head during the 1989 demonstration-massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

June 26, 2008 issue

Roderick MacFarquhar

The End of the Chinese Revolution

What Deng Xiaoping failed to comprehend is that Tiananmen Square 1989 was virtually the mirror opposite of the Cultural Revolution.

July 20, 1989 issue

Liao Yiwu

The Tanks and the People

Twenty-five years ago, before the Tiananmen massacre, my father told me: “Son, be good and stay at home, never provoke the Communist Party.” My father knew what he was talking about.

June 3, 2014

Orville Schell

China’s Spring

In Tiananmen Square, China had spawned one of the largest and best organized nonviolent political protest movements the world had ever seen.

June 29, 1989 issue

Pu Zhiqiang

‘June Fourth’ Seventeen Years Later: How I Kept a Promise

Every year on the evening of June 3, I have come back to Tiananmen to linger for a while. My wife, our son, and I join a few good friends to gather at the base of the Martyrs’ Monument and spend some time in reflection.

August 10, 2006 issue

Perry Link

The Chinese Intellectuals and the Revolt

For foreigners who live in Beijing, it was already clear, listening to intellectuals, students, and ordinary citizens, that yet another modern Chinese crisis was looming. But no one anticipated the force and volume of what happened.

June 29, 1989 issue

The Latest

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

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

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

Willa Glickman

‘People Are Not a Crisis’

Eric Adams has insisted that his administration is doing its best to house New York’s asylum seekers, but the city’s shortage of shelter space is the result of political choices.

July 23, 2023