Politics

Human Rights

Sisyphus on the Street

Tracy Kidder’s portrait of a doctor and his homeless patients offers personhood to people many Americans have trained themselves not to see.

April 4, 2024 issue

Joshua Hammer

Iraq’s Twenty Years of Carnage

Two journalists give eyewitness accounts of the immeasurable damage inflicted on Iraq since the US invasion.

March 21, 2024 issue

Kristen Martin

The Parent Trap

The sociologist Kelley Fong argues that we would do better by children and families if we were to widen our understanding of the social causes of adversity rather than relying solely on the blunt force of Child Protective Services.

March 7, 2024 issue

Emily Raboteau

A New Environmental Canon

New books by Camille Dungy and Elizabeth Rush argue that the ethics of care we often associate with maternity is crucial in combating issues as large as the climate crisis.

February 22, 2024 issue

Matthew Desmond

Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic

Why have Americans not fought to sustain the unprecedented Covid-era expansion of aid to children, renters, and gig workers?

January 18, 2024 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

Marina Warner

No Freedom to Move

The current politics of immigration have twisted human nature against itself, fostering unimaginable maltreatment of those who wish only to survive and live a better life.

November 23, 2023 issue

Joshua Leifer

Inhumane Times

Israel’s current war seems to be as much a brutal insistence on the collective punishment of the Palestinian people as an offensive against Hamas.

November 23, 2023 issue

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

Gabriel Winant

The Making of the Springfield Working Class

Each generation of this country’s workforce has always been urged to detest the next—to come up with its own fantasies of cat-eating immigrants.

September 30, 2024

Ikhtisad Ahmed

A New Chapter for Bangladesh?

When student protesters ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, they not only ended fifteen years of her authoritarian rule but also challenged her party’s self-serving nationalism.

September 28, 2024

Aryeh Neier

Torture in Israel’s Prisons

Recent reports on the conditions in Israeli detention facilities describe them as sites of systematic abuse.

October 17, 2024 issue

Colin Thubron

The Artificiality of Nations

Two recent books advance compassionate cases against the cruelty of closed borders.

October 17, 2024 issue

Loubna El Amine

Lebanon: Memories of War

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon are striking not just individual Hezbollah members but my family’s entire social world.

September 23, 2024

Tim Judah

Voting for Their Jobs

Georgia’s capital might lean toward the opposition in next month’s elections—but in smaller towns dissent is weaker and critics still more embattled.

September 19, 2024

Dunya Mikhail

Betraying Iraqi Girls

If Iraq legalizes child marriage, it would be a victory for a worldview that prioritizes tradition over progress, control over empowerment, and silence over expression.

September 15, 2024

Wallace Shawn

The End of a Village

Jonathan Schell’s account of the US military’s destruction of the village of Ben Suc in Vietnam laid bare the problem with many American interventions.

October 3, 2024 issue

Matthew Desmond

A Prophet for the Poor

In order to build a mass movement for economic justice, Reverend William Barber argues, we need to let go of the idea that poverty is an exclusively Black or urban issue.

October 3, 2024 issue