United States

Amandla Baraka: We Keep Us Safe, June 2020

‘We Must Act Out Our Freedom’

If a person cannot imagine a future, then we would say that that person is depressed. But if a country cannot envision a future, how do we describe its condition?

August 20, 2020 issue

Federal officers dispersing a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Portland, Oregon, September 18, 2020

Jonathan Stevenson

Trump’s Praetorian Guard

President Trump is attempting to turn “law and order versus anarchy” into an election issue that will distract voters from the White House’s incompetence.

October 22, 2020 issue

Joseph O’Neill

Brand New Dems?

Democrats are terrible at “messaging.” It’s time to fix that.

May 28, 2020 issue

Caroline Fraser

Confronting Male Violence

For centuries, men have been saying, “I’ll tear her all to pieces,” and doing it, too

May 28, 2020 issue

Michael Greenberg

Emergency Responder

Prior to the pandemic, few could have predicted the astonishing performance of New York’s unloved governor, Andrew Cuomo

May 14, 2020 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Vector in Chief

To understand Trump’s incoherence, we have to take into account two contradictory impulses within the right-wing mindset: paranoia and risk.

May 14, 2020 issue

Kenan Malik

When Monuments Fall

Perhaps the best way to express the changing attitudes toward the past is not necessarily to tear down statues, but to put up new ones that allow us to acknowledge the complexities of history. Frederick Douglass himself was of this view.

September 9, 2020

Helen Epstein

Left Behind

While poverty in America is all too real, it’s not the only reason for the epidemic of deaths of despair.

March 26, 2020 issue

The Latest

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

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

The Right’s War on Universities

Authoritarians from Mussolini onward have seen colleges as holdouts of liberal democracy—and attacked them relentlessly.

October 15, 2020

Federal agents guarding a rear entrance to the US Courthouse, Portland, Oregon, July 31, 2020

Mattathias Schwartz

The FBI Team Sent to Portland

How the FBI responds to a threat of violent extremism—from the left, rather than the right—could become an urgent issue around Election Day.

October 8, 2020

Donald Trump attending the opening of his Taj Mahal casino with his sister Maryanne and brother Robert, Atlantic City, New Jersey, April 1990

Andrea Bernstein

Pattern of Deception

Trump’s business model, identical to his model of exercising presidential power, is, in the words of Mary Trump’s complaint, to “enrich himself at the expense of everyone else.”

October 5, 2020

David Oshinsky

Health Care: The Best and the Rest

Ezekiel Emanuel’s new book makes a comparative study of eleven of the world’s health care systems. Who are the winners and losers?

October 22, 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

A mother and child in Central Park, New York City, 2015

Caroline Fraser

No Haven

In ‘This Is All I Got,’ a report about a year in the life of a homeless single mother in New York City, Lauren Sandler finds the intractable source of homelessness in the piratical inequities of the housing market.

October 22, 2020 issue

Gary Younge

The Bleak Resonance of ‘Native Son’

One of the reasons Richard Wright’s Native Son remains an enduring classic is because while the racial power structure outlined in the book has evolved over the years, its basic underpinnings remain recognizable even eighty years later.

October 1, 2020

Roger Stone celebrating outside his Florida home after President Trump commuted the sentence of his ally, Fort Lauderdale, July 12, 2020

Ankush Khardori

Rule by Law

The threat that faces the country is of an increasingly dominant rule by law that could include a more comprehensive deployment of the criminal justice system against perceived opponents of the administration.

September 25, 2020

David Cole

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1933–2020

Her career illustrates that one can be radical and incrementalist at the same time; indeed, as she argued, it may be the only way to achieve enduring change.

September 20, 2020