The Latest

Arts in Society

The Claims of Close Reading

Literary studies have been starved by austerity, but their core methodology remains radical.

Class & Inequality Gender & Sexuality

The Care Factory

In the decades since the Wages for Housework movement, care work has become a site of profit in ways its leaders could never have predicted.

Politics

Profiting in Nowhereland

The sordid histories behind Texas’s new industrial-scale immigration detention center, Camp East Montana.

Politics

First Day of School in South Rimal

Classes have started for a lucky few, but Gaza’s public sector lies in ruins.

Philosophy

What We Call Progress

Can we still imagine change for the better? Critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi tries in her new book.

Politics

The Kitchen Tables Behind Mamdani’s Kitchen-Table Strategy

Staging sites aren’t new to political campaigns, but they’ve never been done like this before.

Politics

The Conservatives Who Think Trump Isn’t Going Far Enough

MAGA’s base is more fractured than it looks.

Law Politics

What Are We Living Through?

Three competing narratives of the second Trump administration.

Arts in Society Philosophy

Plato and the Poets

The centuries-old debate should be settled: an intellectual world bereft of poetry is a damaged one.

Politics Race

Building a Political Home

Activist and scholar Cathy J. Cohen on winning power in the midst of a “generational war.”

Politics

The Inventor of the Future

The autobiography of anticolonial luminary Andrée Blouin captures her era’s euphoric highs as well as its tragic denouement.

Law

The Moral Stupefaction of the American Public

Trump’s boat strikes will seek cover in the same specious legality debate the Bush administration sowed with the torture memos.

Politics

A Theory of the List

From runaway slave lists to Canary Mission, the state has long deputized citizens to enforce its will.

Politics

What Is Political Violence?

Pundits and politicians conceal the truth: it’s all around us, perpetrated by our political system itself.

Philosophy Politics

How Can We Live Together?

Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

Politics

The Strongman’s Surveillance State

Trump has unfrozen a Biden-era hold on powerful Israeli-made spyware, now in the hands of ICE.

Law Politics

Letter to the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism

Your approach is toxic and threatens core democratic values. You must change course or cease to exist.

Class & Inequality Politics

MAHA v. Mamdani

Our broken food system and the real roots of American unwellness.

Politics Science

How to Lie with (Political) Statistics

Inside the data wars over Democratic strategy.

Politics

A General Air of Anxiety

The Red Scare targeted my father. He taught me the meaning of resistance.

Arts in Society Philosophy

In Search of Arab Jews

Can a culture be resurrected?

Politics

The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide

Speaking the truth and exposing lies is not enough.

Politics

Democracy v. the Constitution

An interview with Osita Nwanevu about his new book, The Right of the People, and why defeating authoritarianism requires going back to democratic basics.

Arts in Society Gender & Sexuality

Creatures Apart

Shulamith Firestone’s portraits of madness reveal a condition afflicting us all.

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