Politics

United States

The Truths of Our American Empire

Jonathan Blitzer’s new book deftly explains the impact of decades of US foreign policy on Central America, but fails to move beyond the troubled terrain of our immigration policy “crisis.”

April 18, 2024 issue

Linda Greenhouse

Social Progress & the Courts

For decades Gerald Rosenberg, author of The Hollow Hope, has argued that courts labor under structural constraints that will almost always deprive them of the ability to bring about significant change. He would be entitled to a triumphant “I told you so” but for one dramatic development: the 2015 Supreme Court decision that recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

March 21, 2024 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Laugh Riot

To understand Trump’s continuing hold over his fans, we have to ask: Why do they find him so funny?

March 21, 2024 issue

John Washington

Burning Up

Reading John Vaillant’s Fire Weather and Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First, you may wonder if civilization is getting so hot that we’re no longer thinking straight.

May 9, 2024 issue

Walter M. Shaub Jr.

The Corruption Playbook

Donald Trump’s plan to destroy civil service protections if reelected is more than an employees’ rights issue. What’s at stake is democracy itself.

April 18, 2024 issue

David Cole

Who Should Regulate Online Speech?

A number of cases before the Supreme Court this term will determine the future of free speech on the Internet.

March 21, 2024 issue

Kristen Martin

The Parent Trap

The sociologist Kelley Fong argues that we would do better by children and families if we were to widen our understanding of the social causes of adversity rather than relying solely on the blunt force of Child Protective Services.

March 7, 2024 issue

Jeffrey Toobin

Circuit Breakers

Judges on the Fifth Circuit, many of them Trump appointees, are attempting to transform the law and challenge the very structure of American government.

March 7, 2024 issue

Mass Incarceration

Jacob Kang-Brown and Jack Norton

America’s Hidden Gulag

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

February 19, 2021

Audience members at the New York City Council hearing on the closure of the Rikers Island Jail and the building of four borough-based jails, New York City Hall, September 5, 2019

Anakwa Dwamena

Competing Visions for New York City’s Jails

With the future of New York City’s correctional system at stake, the overwhelming feeling among activists and community members is disappointment and frustration.

October 4, 2019

Yasmina Price

Everyday Resistance in ‘Time’

Garrett Bradley’s intimate documentary shows how one person’s incarceration affects the lives of so many more.

October 24, 2020

Tameca Cole: Locked in a Dark Calm, 2016

Nicole R. Fleetwood

Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

I began what would become Marking Time by displaying photos of incarcerated relatives around my apartment, partly as an attempt to work through my own discomfort with the pictures of them in prison, and to bring their presence into my daily life.

April 28, 2020

The Latest

Joseph O’Neill

Bring Back the Fight!

In recent weeks, Harris and Walz have replaced a dynamic movement with a meat-and-potatoes campaign. That needs to change.

October 3, 2024

Gabriel Winant

The Making of the Springfield Working Class

Each generation of this country’s workforce has always been urged to detest the next—to come up with its own fantasies of cat-eating immigrants.

September 30, 2024

Samuel Earle

The Problems with Polls

Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no longer imagine without it.

October 17, 2024 issue

Colin Thubron

The Artificiality of Nations

Two recent books advance compassionate cases against the cruelty of closed borders.

October 17, 2024 issue

Suzanne Schneider

What the New Right Wants

The Heritage Foundation has reinvented itself to include a new generation of conservatives at odds with their elders. Project 2025 lays bare the contradictions.

September 22, 2024

Fintan O’Toole

Trump’s Old News

The debate showed that the former president faces a new danger: not that his lies are outlandish but that they are getting stale.

September 13, 2024

Matthew Desmond

A Prophet for the Poor

In order to build a mass movement for economic justice, Reverend William Barber argues, we need to let go of the idea that poverty is an exclusively Black or urban issue.

October 3, 2024 issue

Linda Greenhouse

Are Sheriffs Above the Law?

County sheriffs are useful to the right. They appear regularly as talking heads on conservative media, especially on the subject of immigration. Many vignettes of sheriffs in action are dramatic and alarming. But how representative are they?

October 3, 2024 issue