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History

Class & Inequality, Law & Justice

Time Is the Universal Measure of Freedom

Labor activists once understood time to be a checking mechanism on market activity. In our own era of uncontrolled working hours, this is a vision of freedom worth recapturing.

Mike Konczal

Politics

The False Promise of Obama's 'Promised Land'

In his new memoir the former president makes clear he had no intention of being a savior.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Arts in Society

Untangling Fiction and Reality in the Balkans

The award-winning documentary ‘Honeyland’ sets out to offer a timeless environmental parable, but in the process it also explores misconceptions about the region’s culture and history. 

Daniel Petrick

Class & Inequality, Politics

What We Still Get Wrong About Alexander Hamilton

Far from a partisan for free markets, the Founding Father insisted on the need for economic planning. We need more of that vision today.

Christian Parenti, Michael Busch

Race

Caste Does Not Explain Race

The celebration of Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over the needs and struggles of ordinary people.

Charisse Burden-Stelly

Philosophy & Religion

Can We Deduce Our Way to Salvation?

A new book suggests that modern readers can still follow the path of reason that Spinoza traced to true well-being, but they might not want to.

Carlos Fraenkel

Politics

How Did the GOP Become the Party of Ideas?

If Trump was the end of the “party of ideas,” the rise of Reagan was its start. But what were those “ideas” in the first place, and were they really as new as people said?

Lawrence B. Glickman

Science & Nature

How Americans Came to Distrust Science

For a century, critics of all political stripes have challenged the role of science in society. Repairing distrust today requires confronting those arguments head on.

Andrew Jewett

Class & Inequality

The Gadfly of American Plutocracy

Far from a marginal outsider, a new biography contends, Thorstein Veblen was the most important economic thinker of the Gilded Age.

Simon Torracinta

Arts in Society

Museums and Mourning in COVID-19

The history of 1989’s first annual Day Without Art reveals how museums rose to the challenge of responding to HIV/AIDS, and may offer guidance for how they can do so again in the face of COVID-19.

Jackson Davidow

Politics

Is There a War on Thanksgiving?

Some on the right insist that efforts to curtail Thanksgiving are in reality sinister attempts to rewrite the country’s history.

Jonathan Beecher Field

Class & Inequality

How Latin America Reimagined Classical Economics

The region has a long legacy of critical engagement with classical political economy, helping to change the way we think about markets and morals.

Nicola Miller

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