Politics Literature Arts Ideas

United States

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

Shennette Garrett-Scott

What Price Wholeness?

A detailed new proposal for reparations for slavery raises three critical questions: How much, exactly, does America owe? Where will the money come from? And who gets paid?

February 11, 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

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

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

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

Helen Epstein

Steeltown in the Rearview

The images Stephen Shore took in 1977 of scenes from the Rust Belt captured the start of a slow-rolling social catastrophe.

April 19, 2021

Makenna Goodman

Whose ‘Good Life’?

As back-to-the-land pioneers, Scott and Helen Nearing were gurus of a social movement enjoying renewed interest. But it’s an equivocal legacy.

April 17, 2021

Tamsin Shaw

Flacking for Facebook

How perfect that a failed Liberal Democrat should be leading the PR effort to persuade us that liberal democracy is safe with the social media giant.

April 13, 2021

Ankush Khardori

Who Will Answer for This Cruelty?

Trump officials who enforced the family separation policy have so far had a pass. This can’t be a repeat of the failed accountability over Bush-era torture.

April 9, 2021

James Oakes

Why Did the Slave Trade Survive So Long?

The history of the Atlantic slave trade after the American Revolution is a story of sustained efforts to suppress it even as demand for African slaves increased.

April 8, 2021 issue

Steven Simon

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

Maeve Higgins

Biden and the Border Security-Industrial Complex

Successive administrations have poured money into the business of militarizing immigration control—and lobbyists have returned the favors. Will this president stop the juggernaut?

March 2, 2021