United States

Turning Away from the Middle East

The Biden administration will seek to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran, but its main focus will be on domestic affairs and relations with China.

April 8, 2021 issue

Michael Tomasky

Can the Senate Restore Majority Rule?

The filibuster, invented to uphold slavery, must be eliminated if Democrats hope to deliver progressive legislation.

April 8, 2021 issue

Darryl Pinckney

A Gift for the Long Game

Obama’s memoir of his first term is a story of aiming high and settling for what he could get.

March 25, 2021 issue

Ian Frazier

The Plushbottoms of Teton County

Life in the richest and most unequal county in America.

December 17, 2020 issue

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

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

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

Linda Greenhouse

Grievance Conservatives Are Here to Stay

What accounts for the paradox of religious ascendance over an ever more secular American society?

July 1, 2021 issue

Sean Wilentz

Forging an Early Black Politics

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

July 1, 2021 issue

Caitlin Zaloom

The Broken Promise of Retirement

If the US does nothing to fix its retirement system, 2.6 million formerly middle-class workers will be plunged into poverty by 2022.

July 1, 2021 issue

Hari Kunzru

As American as Family Separation

Though the cruelties of the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy were unique, they were part of a long American tradition of taking children from their parents.

July 1, 2021 issue

Mark Danner

‘Reality Rebellion’

By doubling down on Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, Republicans are making their base angrier, more radical, and more likely to turn to violence.

July 1, 2021 issue

Claudia Dreifus interviews Marc Elias

‘Democracy Is at Stake’

The expert elections lawyer knocked down scores of pro-Trump lawsuits challenging the 2020 results. Now, he says, we’re in a struggle to save the republic.

June 1, 2021

Francesca Mari

The True Cost of Living

“Gross inequity begets precarity and suffering, which begets fear, shame, and frustration.”

May 29, 2021

Francesca Mari

How Can We Stop Gun Violence?

The US has the highest homicide rate of any high-income country, but more police may not be the most effective solution.

June 10, 2021 issue

Michael Kazin

The Enduring Promise of Moral Capitalism

“To put political muscle and government funding behind the Constitution’s vow ‘to promote the general Welfare’ has been and remains the best way to unify Democrats and win.”

May 15, 2021

Jessica T. Mathews

Losing No Time

In his first hundred days President Biden has been bold, decisive, and willing to take risks in his foreign policy judgments, but his early mistakes on Iran and Taiwan may have dangerous consequences.

May 27, 2021 issue