Human Rights

Pictures at Work

Betty Medsger’s photographs of American women at their jobs, a feminist statement in the 1970s, have had a long afterlife.

November 2, 2022

Peter Canby

The Death Squad Dossier

Decades after Guatemala’s long civil war, a chronicle of government kidnapping and disappearance is bringing former officials to trial. Will there be justice for the victims?

December 8, 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

Reginald Dwayne Betts and Serhiy Zhadan

Holding a Gun

An exchange of letters between Reginald Dwayne Betts and Serhiy Zhadan, lyrical writers of the tough places they come from.

November 24, 2022 issue

Darryl Pinckney

Georgia’s Battle Over the Ballot

The New Georgia Project has been working for years on getting blacks to register and vote, but it must find ways to overcome the state’s long and complicated history of voter suppression.

November 24, 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

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

‘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

Yasmine El Rashidi

#FreeAlaa

Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s imprisonment has never been about what he did but rather who he is, what he represents.

November 12, 2022

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

Ursula Lindsey

Rape and Resistance in Egypt

A new book recounts the heroics of activists who organized to protect women from sexual violence during the Egyptian revolution and to assert their right to participate in the country’s political life.

February 23, 2023 issue

Timothy Garton Ash

Ukraine in Our Future

Ukraine faces extraordinary challenges, but it also presents a challenge for Europe—and a great opportunity.

February 23, 2023 issue

Alice Driver

Working in Their Sleep

Meatpacking workers in Arkansas, grieving loved ones lost to Covid and struggling to pay medical bills, are organizing for justice from their employer.

December 23, 2022

Ursula Lindsey

‘Focus on the Football’

This year’s World Cup in Qatar has become both a referendum on its host’s human rights record and a space for competing gestures of solidarity.

December 9, 2022

Frederic Wehrey

Libya’s Perfect Storm

Climate change has brought a dangerous new dimension to the country’s political strife.

December 3, 2022

Michael Tomasky

Looming Questions for the Democrats

Their responsibility these next two years will be to continue, without apology, on the economic path they’ve been pursuing.

December 22, 2022 issue

Sean Wilentz

The Emancipators’ Vision

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?

December 22, 2022 issue

Ada Wordsworth

Ukrainian Lessons at the Train Station

A diverse community of volunteers has gathered on the Polish border to assist Ukrainian refugees, but the outlook for Ukrainian refugees already in Europe is often bleak.

December 8, 2022 issue