The Latest
How long have you gone without seeing a tree?
I ask my brother if he can hear cicadas where he is. My brother doesn’t know what cicadas are. He is 40 years old. He asks me to repeat it.
The Utopian Pulse
Dependence is a fact of all our lives; freedom lies in our capacity to care for others.
From the Editors: The Politics of Pleasure
What if “post-growth living” could be an opportunity for greater pleasure, not less?
The Inflated Promise of Science Education
Building public trust requires far more than the conveyance of facts and instruction in scientific thinking.
How the International Criminal Court Could Prosecute Putin
The legal doctrine of “superior responsibility” makes the Russian president liable for war crimes committed in Ukraine.
The Democratic Potential of Cruising
Cruising extends the political value of the city as a space that brings us into contact with people who seem unlike us until we realize our shared desires.
The Asset Economy Strikes Again
The Federal Reserve’s bid to “get wages down” reflects the enduring hold of neoliberal thought at the highest levels of economic policymaking.
What’s Wrong with Technocracy?
Democratic theory points to two problems: unjust concentrations of power and a flawed theory of knowledge.
Two poems by Raisa Tolchinsky
in your carpeted office you lay my life down / and say open up to that small room in my sternum.
The Education of Ben Bernanke
His new book cuts through economic orthodoxy on central banking. But he fails to reckon deeply with its political consequences.
Summoning Freedom
A conversation with Tananarive Due, Rasheedah Phillips, and Celeste Winston about Afrofuturism’s vision of Black liberation.
The New Moral Mathematics
In his new book, philosopher William MacAskill implies that humanity’s long-term survival matters more than preventing short-term suffering and death.
Science Fiction as Poetry
In her new book, Danish poet Olga Ravn writes with open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations.
Life Sentences for Ahmaud Arbery’s Killers Are Nothing to Celebrate
Draconian individual punishment distracts from systemic change and reinforces the cruelest and most racist system of incarceration on the planet.
Nine Ways That Capitalism Is Ruining Sex
Our well-being depends on a better understanding of how the logic of labor has twisted our relationship with pleasure.
The Paris of China
“I was my father’s son. My father was Nai Nai’s least favorite.” A Taiwanese American man, driven from home by a secret, reevaluates his childhood memories of his grandmother.
The Mexican Revolution as U.S. History
In her new book, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández makes the case for why U.S. history only makes sense when told as a binational story.
How Capitalism—Not a Few Bad Actors—Destroyed the Internet
Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy are to blame for today’s regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy can undo it.
Twenty Years of Freedom Dreams
Robin D. G. Kelley published his pathbreaking history of the Black radical imagination in 2002. Where are we two decades later?
After Dobbs
An interview on the post-Dobbs legal landscape—and how the federal government can respond.
Get our newsletter
Vital reading on politics, ideas, and culture to your inbox
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975
Registered 501(c)(3) organization
Help Us Stay Paywall-Free
Become a Member