Politics Literature Arts Ideas

United States

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

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

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

Roberta Brandes Gratz

How NYC Is Zoning Out the Human Scale

This is a New York story only for now. Upzonings and transfers of newly created air rights are occurring in cities around the country. When it comes to real estate, New York City may lead the way, but others follow in time.

December 30, 2019

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

Tenants Under Siege: Inside New York City’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

The Latest

David Cole

Let the Decision Stand

Every argument against Roe was squarely rejected in the Supreme Court’s 1992 Casey decision, and nothing has changed since then except the composition of the Court.

November 4, 2021 issue

Diana R. Gordon

Another Immigration Purgatory for Children

Rather than detain unaccompanied minors, the US places tens of thousands with families every year—then virtually abandons them. Detention is not good policy, but neither is neglect.

September 27, 2021

Robert L. Tsai

The New Abortion Vigilantism

The abortion bounty law is novel and thus far unique to Texas, but similar civil enforcement regimes have a much darker history.

September 23, 2021

Michael Greenberg

New York After Cuomo

He was a master centrist and brilliant consolidator of his own power. Who will control the state now that he’s gone?

October 7, 2021 issue

Molly Crabapple

Occupy Memory

A decade ago, a grassroots anticapitalist movement burst on the scene, galvanizing people with its slogan “We are the 99 percent.” It changed me, and many others, but how much did it change the world?

September 16, 2021

Claudia Dreifus

‘I Walk Through My Fear’

The artist became known for her images of a circle that would be decimated by AIDS. Today, she’s using ACT UP-style activism to highlight the Sacklers’ part in the opioid crisis—and stop museums taking their money.

September 13, 2021

Jelani Cobb

A Warning Ignored

American society did exactly what the Kerner Commission on the urban riots of the mid-1960s advised against, and fifty years later reaped the consequences it predicted.

August 19, 2021 issue

Annette Gordon-Reed

The Color Line

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present a “graphical narrative” of the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.

August 19, 2021 issue

Steven Simon

How Can We Neutralize the Militias?

The threat of violence from domestic far-right extremists calls for a measured and well-coordinated response from law enforcement and intelligence services.

August 19, 2021 issue

Anastasia Edel

What the US Could Learn from the USSR

Getting into a good school is a baffling process riddled with inequity. For all its abuses, one thing about the Soviet system I grew up in was its broad access to higher education.

July 25, 2021