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Science & Nature

What the Health Care Debate Still Gets Wrong

A decade ago, Harvard surgeon Atul Gawande helped popularize the idea that health care spending is high because we use too much medicine. He was wrong: it’s the prices, and who pays them.

Gender & Sexuality, Law & Justice

‘Flexible’ Family Leave Is Lousy Feminism

Balancing work-life pressures is often considered the holy grail, but men can still opt out of these policies. To move the needle on gender inequality, the state needs to take more coercive action.

Forum

The American Corporation is in Crisis—Let's Rethink It

For decades, shareholder primacy has obscured the fact that employees should do well when businesses do well. Now, as that foundation crumbles, thirteen thinkers debate new reforms that could transform the inequalities at the heart of our economy.

Lenore Palladino

Philosophy & Religion

The Critical Bite of Cultural Relativism

The pioneers of cultural anthropology taught not just how to study other cultures, but how to criticize their own.

War & Security

The Making of the American Gulag

During the Cold War, the “police apparatus” was held up as a prime example of Soviet repression. Yet in its efforts to fight subversives, the United States ended up with its own carceral state.

Stuart Schrader

Science & Nature

Global Warming, Market Opportunity

On the lure of climate entrepreneurism.

War & Security

How Do We End the Never-Ending Wars?

Wars may begin like they always have, but they no longer end as they once did. We need an ethics of war termination to hold politicians accountable.

Class & Inequality, Law & Justice

The Harvard Ruling Misses the Point

A judge has ruled in favor of Harvard in a high-profile case about affirmative action. But recent admissions scandals all point to a deeper problem—the presumption that elitism could ever be democratized.

Law & Justice

U.S. Judges Admit Enhanced Interrogation Is Torture

They also acknowledged, for the first time, that the grounds for torturing Abu Zubaydah—who was detained in the wake of September 11 and is still languishing in Guantánamo—were mistaken.

Joseph Margulies

Race

The Conservative Black Nationalism of Clarence Thomas

Joshua Cohen and Corey Robin discuss the black nationalism at the heart of Thomas’s conservative jurisprudence—and what it means for those on the left who often dismiss the justice’s use of race.

Joshua Cohen, Corey Robin

Race

Before America Burned

A new book explores how William F. Buckley, Jr., and James Baldwin came to share a stage in 1965 and what their debate over black inequality reveals about the modern conservative movement.

Philosophy & Religion

The Future of Political Philosophy

For five decades Anglophone political philosophy has been dominated by the liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls. With liberalism in crisis, have these ideas outlived their time?

Katrina Forrester

Law & Justice

‘Flexible’ Family Leave Is Lousy Feminism

How Cars Transformed Policing

The Right to Boycott

Radhika Sainath

The Legality and Reality of Torture

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

The Harvard Ruling Misses the Point

Solidarity in Silicon Valley

Rethinking Birthright

Stephanie DeGooyer

The Metastasis of the Misdemeanor System

Brandon L. Garrett

U.S. Judges Admit Enhanced Interrogation Is Torture

Joseph Margulies

Arts in Society

Got Shakespeare?

Jonathan Beecher Field

Sultan of Hearts

Matthew Jeffrey Vegari

Supervising the Woods

Flannery’s Peacocks

Get a Good Look at You

Two Poems

November 5, 1980

Reginald Dwayne Betts

Shame

Polar Bodies

READING LISTS

The Legality and Reality of Torture

READING LIST

Our best writing from our archives on why torture is not the same thing as interrogation.

“Listen to the Science”

READING LIST

Are scientists more virtuous than the rest of us? Can religion and science be happily reconciled?

JOIN GIVE

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