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

Piper French

The Reunited

The Biden administration has spent years reunifying families separated during Trump’s first term—but as his second approaches, they find themselves vulnerable again.

December 11, 2024

James A. Goldston and Aryeh Neier

The ICC: Myths and Realities

The most prominent arguments against the court’s recent arrest warrants for Israeli leaders fall apart under scrutiny.

December 6, 2024

Charles Glass

Lebanon’s Year of Living Ambiguously

After the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah decided to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political and economic plight.

December 19, 2024 issue