United States

What Price Wholeness?

A detailed new proposal for reparations for slavery raises three critical questions: How much, exactly, does America owe? Where will the money come from? And who gets paid?

February 11, 2021 issue

Ian Frazier

The Plushbottoms of Teton County

Life in the richest and most unequal county in America.

December 17, 2020 issue

A migrant child looking through the US-Mexico border fence, Tijuana, November 2018

Francisco Cantú

The Lie of American Asylum

Three new books offer searing portraits of the people affected by family separations and the criminalization of asylum in the Trump era.

November 5, 2020 issue

Diane Ravitch

The Dark History of School Choice

How an argument for segregated schools became a rallying cry for privatizing public education.

January 14, 2021 issue

Caroline Fraser

The Representative

Ilhan Omar’s ability to survive, even thrive, under chaotic conditions appears to have been a harbinger of a taste for political battle.

November 19, 2020 issue

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi

The Revival of Church Sanctuary

How a long-abandoned practice became a way for undocumented immigrants to seek protection.

November 19, 2020 issue

A house damaged by Hurricane Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, 2005

Eric Klinenberg

A Disaster 100 Years in the Making

Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we’re willing—and unwilling—to protect.

October 22, 2020 issue

Workers from a Koch Foods plant being taken away by ICE agents during a raid, Morton, Mississippi, August 7, 2019

Julia Preston

Deportation Nation

The deportation system held sway over immigrant communities long before Trump became president, but under his direction it has become even more far-reaching, arbitrary, and cruel.

October 8, 2020 issue

America’s Housing Crisis

A deteriorating bank-owned house, Moreno Valley, California, August 2008

Francesca Mari

The Housing Vultures

The investors who exploited the 2008 financial crisis are dictating the bailout of this one.

June 11, 2020 issue

Moms 4 Housing activist Dominique Walker standing in front of 2928 Magnolia Street, the house the group occupied starting in November 2019, declaring that housing is “a human right,

E. Tammy Kim

Moms 4 Housing & the Right to a Home

In Oakland, a coordinated, grassroots response to the housing emergency is revealing new potential for inspiring change.

March 9, 2020

A view from 7 DeKalb Avenue, an apartment tower in Downtown Brooklyn. Eighty percent of its 250 apartments are subsidized units, for which there were 87,754 applications when it opened.

Michael Greenberg

New York’s Housing Crisis

New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency. The tide of homelessness is only the most visible symptom.

August 17, 2017 issue

Gabriel M. Schivone

America’s Eviction Epidemic

Across the country, millions of people are facing eviction as protections in place for the pandemic have lapsed.

September 16, 2020

Reinier de Graaf

Cabrini Blues

If public housing is the physical manifestation of a hope for social progress, that hope has its own historical twist in the United States.

September 27, 2018 issue

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2014; photograph by Mark Power from the series ‘Postcards from America’

Jason DeParle

Kicked Out in America!

Matthew Desmond’s ‘Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City’

March 10, 2016 issue

The Latest

Fintan O’Toole

To Hell with Unity

Biden’s ability to govern depends on abandoning any hope of reconciliation with the GOP.

March 25, 2021 issue

Molly Jong-Fast

What the FBI Had on Grandpa

J. Edgar Hoover thought Howard Fast was an un-American menace. To my family, he was just a menace, period. But his file tells a different story.

February 21, 2021

Jacob Kang-Brown

America’s Hidden Gulag

The nationwide federal detention of immigrants in county jails perpetuates a profit-driven system of mass incarceration.

February 19, 2021

Brandon M. Terry

What Dignity Demands

A new book persuasively places Malcolm X and Martin Luther King at the center of each other’s most dramatic transformations.

March 11, 2021 issue

T.H. Breen

How Did the Colonies Unite?

The drive for American independence coalesced in only a few years of rapidly accelerating political change.

March 11, 2021 issue

Richard A. Friedman

Why Conspiracy Theories Are So Alluring

The human preference for plausible meaning over stubborn facts makes us especially susceptible in a world constantly flooded with information.

February 12, 2021

Caroline Fraser

The Stench of American Neglect

In her new book, the activist Catherine Coleman Flowers chronicles her efforts to expose criminally deficient sanitation in her home county of Lowndes, Alabama and around the US.

February 25, 2021 issue

Christopher Benfey

Pranksters and Puritans

Peter Mancall’s biography of Thomas Morton discusses Morton’s attempts to provoke the Pilgrims and undercut the Puritans.

February 25, 2021 issue

Brandon M. Terry

Malcolm’s Ministry

Malcolm X’s dramatic life, and his insistence that the most disadvantaged play a part in their own emancipation, exert a strong pull on his many biographers.

February 25, 2021 issue