Print Issue Archive

What does a just world look like? This volume begins with a planet beset by accumulating crises—environmental, social, and political—and imagines how we can move beyond them. Guest edited by Adom Getachew. 

Efforts to green the economy and distribute wealth more equitably often sound like a program for joyless lives: make do with less and give up your pleasures. But what if “post-growth living” could be an opportunity for greater pleasure, not less?

Going beyond constitutional jurisprudence as conventionally understood, some of today’s top legal experts consider the ways that legal thinking has bolstered—rather than corrected—injustice.

Our new arts anthology explores whether and how we can repair from terrible ruptures, life-threatening illnesses and pandemic, toxic politics, racist horrors, and more.

From climate change to the pandemic, uncertainty looms large over our public and personal lives. Eleven thinkers consider its scientific, philosophic, economic, and emotional aspects, and make clear that uncertainty need not be paralyzing.

Public Purpose makes a compelling case for industrial policy—what it is, and why we need it now. Addressing investment, innovation, supply chains, and growth, it provides a robust vision of a renewed industrial policy, and what it can offer the US economy in the face of climate change and a global pandemic.

Artificial intelligence will not create superintelligence anytime soon. But it is already making huge advances—revolutionizing medicine and transport, transforming jobs and markets, and reshaping the fabric of social life. At the same time, the promises of AI have been increasingly overshadowed by its perils, from automation and disinformation to powerful new forms of bias and surveillance. Reckoning with these threats to work, democracy, and justice, Redesigning AI asks what can be done to redirect AI for the good of everyone.

It is rare now for people to stay where they were raised, and when we encounter one another—whether in person or, increasingly, online—it is usually in contexts that obscure if not outright hide details about our past. But even in moments of pure self-invention, we are always shaped by the past. In Ancestors, some of today’s most imaginative writers consider what it means to be made and fashioned by others. Are we shaped by grandparents, family, the deep past, political forebears, inherited social and economic circumstances? Can we choose our family, or is blood always thicker? And looking forward, what will it mean to be ancestors ourselves, and how will our descendants remember us?

Despite decades of activism and scientific consensus about the perils of climate change, our economies remain deeply dependent on fossil fuels. How are we to meet the challenge of global warming before it is too late? Climate Action asks what we must do to begin realizing a green future today.