Forums

The Forum is our signature feature, bringing writers, scholars, and activists into dialogue about fundamental issues and pressing challenges.

Protecting the Internet Without Wrecking It

How to meet the security threat.

Can We Stop Global Warming?

There is a lot we don’t know about climate change, but what we do know should motivate us to action.

Making Aid Work

Aid can help to address global poverty. But we need hard evidence—like randomized controlled trials—to tell us which programs work.

Exit Strategy

How to disengage from Iraq in 18 months.

What’s Hurting the Middle Class

Critics say Americans are over-borrowing. The data tell a different story.

In the National Interest

A grand new strategy for American foreign policy.

The Right Fight

Enlisted by the feds, can police find sleeper cells and protect civil rights, too?

How Can the Democrats Win?

Democrats must embrace an economic liberalism superjumbo, and they must stick with it even if they lose.

What We Owe to Parents

The goal should not be to render child-rearing costless. The goal should be to lighten the burden.

What Makes Schools Work?

Why private-school tuition vouchers are not the answer.

Islam and the Challenge of Democracy

How can a democratic conception of the people’s authority be reconciled with an Islamic understanding of God’s authority?

Civil Liberties after 9/11

We should resist trading off liberties for security for reasons of principle, pragmatism, and self-interest.

Citizenship in Emergency

Can democracy protect us against terrorism?

Reclaiming the Commons

The silent theft of our shared assets and civic inheritance need not continue.

Can Working Families Ever Win?

If we do not take the needs of working families as a keystone, the gaps between poor and rich children will only grow wider.

The Place of Tolerance in Islam

On reading and misreading the Qur’an.

The Case for Binationalism

Palestine should be transformed into a secular state—a constitutional-liberal state, with Arabs and Jews as its national citizens.

The Search for New Voting Technology

America’s voting technologies are gravely inefficient, but solutions are less complicated than many politicians have indicated.

Is the Internet Bad for Democracy?

Emerging technologies increase people’s ability to wall themselves off from topics and opinions that they would prefer to avoid, creating serious dangers.

Beyond the Civil Rights Industry

Black problems are real, and often getting worse. We need new leadership community-based leadership in the black community.

Stepping Up Labor Standards

Even as globalization makes us complicit in terrible abuses of workers, it opens up new possibilities for public action.

Social Justice Is Good for Our Health

How greater economic equality would promote public health.

The Future of Affirmative Action

We need to situate the conversation about race, gender, and affirmative action in a wider account of democratic opportunity.

Moving Out of the Ghetto

The state must undertake all action necessary to end the social processes that continue to perpetuate the near-caste structure of American society.

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