Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Human Rights

J. Hoberman

Framing Babyn Yar

Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries, sourced from archival propaganda, have drawn criticism for what they do not show.

March 29, 2022

David S. Reynolds

In the Shadow of Slavery

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

February 24, 2022 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Liberation Psychology

How Frantz Fanon came to view violence as therapy.

February 24, 2022 issue

photographs by Louis Witter

Exodus from Ukraine

Scenes at the Polish border, which is seeing part of the largest, most sudden displacement of population since the period after World War II.

March 5, 2022

Russian Congress of Intellectuals

An Open Letter to the Russian Leadership

Our position is simple: Russia does not need a war with Ukraine and the West. Such a war is devoid of legitimacy and has no moral basis.

February 4, 2022

Tim Judah

Kyiv Under Siege

As I write, the siren begins to sound again and the app on my phone sends me a red alert.

March 3, 2022

Gal Beckerman

Samizdat and the Moral Collapse of the USSR

For all its sacrifices, Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s life is emblematic of what a network of poets, thinkers, and activists achieved by daring to defy a totalitarian state.

February 13, 2022

Jill Filipovic, an interview with Rebecca Gomperts

Choice by Mail

With Roe v. Wade under threat, abortion rights in the US are facing their greatest challenge yet. Enter the Dutch doctor who has opened a new front with safe medication on demand.

January 11, 2022

The Latest

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

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

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

Rahmane Idrissa

Potent Policies of Empire

The contest in Mali between the West and Russia is not a front in a new cold war but rather part of a scramble for Africa’s resources.

May 25, 2022

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

Sue Halpern

Before the Fall

As evangelicals came into the GOP tent, Republican voters and politicians traded women’s bodies for political power.

May 11, 2022

Meaghan Winter

Weak Protagonists

While purporting to be the party of reproductive rights, Democrats have consistently failed to take a strong stance on abortion. Can they still stand up to minority rule?

May 10, 2022