United States

A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent

Stephen Breyer’s dissent in the Supreme Court’s Parents Involved case has proved prophetic about the decision’s consequences for racial integration in public schools.

October 6, 2022 issue

David S. Reynolds

Throngs of Unseen People

In the Houses of Their Despair, Terry Alford’s history of spiritualism during the Civil War era, suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

October 6, 2022 issue

Mark Danner

The Slow-Motion Coup

What has Donald Trump taken from our democracy?

October 6, 2022 issue

Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson

These Disunited States

It is time to consider a radical solution to stave off the prospect of political violence and even civil war in the US.

September 22, 2022 issue

Sarah Schulman

The Same Problem on Repeat

Monkeypox is now, with Covid-19 and HIV, one of the viruses at the center of American life. Yet even now that preventive treatments for all three exist, the US has failed to help people access them.

September 4, 2022

Eric Foner

The Complicity of the Textbooks

In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.

September 22, 2022 issue

Laurence H. Tribe

Deconstructing Dobbs

Whether or not one sees the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision as barely concealed theocracy, it fails to provide any coherent legal analysis of why the right to abortion is not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

September 22, 2022 issue

Hari Kunzru

Socialists on the Knife-Edge

From early utopian communities to the leftist resurgence today, the history of American socialism is deeper than its meager successes.

August 18, 2022 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

Joshua Cohen

Lucky Guy

Jared Kushner’s anti-ideological ideology is to get the best deal for whomever he represents—the business he was born into, the business he married into, and, most of all, himself.

October 20, 2022 issue

Jamieson Webster

A Child Is Being Aborted

Psychoanalysis helped me make sense of my desire to have a child. It also exposes the fantasies at the root of the fear of abortion.

September 21, 2022

Bench Ansfield

A Theater of State Panic

Beginning in 1967, the Army built fake towns to train police and military officers in counterinsurgency. Sierra Pettengill’s new documentary lays bare the fears and false promises behind them.

September 16, 2022

Blair McClendon

A Brutal Place Playing at Paradise

The filmmaker James Benning invites us to look closely at American landscapes and peer into their history.

August 31, 2022

Sophie Pinkham

Trade Exceptions

In Brittney Griner, the Putin administration may have found the perfect hostage to leverage into a high-profile prisoner swap.

August 14, 2022

Fintan O’Toole

The Irish Lesson

If the purpose of abortion bans is to actually reduce the rate at which women terminate pregnancies, the Irish experience shows how utterly ineffectual they are.

August 18, 2022 issue

Mark Danner

We’re in an Emergency—Act Like It!

At a time when the threat of authoritarianism is rising, Democrats have a duty to make crystal clear to voters what is at stake in the November elections.

August 18, 2022 issue