Books & Ideas

Queer in Rural America

Many LGBT Americans live in rural places. Their invisibility to the gay rights movement is a problem.

  • Hugh Ryan

Introduction to Reading Other Women

Literature can be a primary engine of dialogue and empathy, but it—or rather, the reading public—is often complicit in the silencing of global women of color.

  • Rafia Zakaria

Between Experts and Citizens

Brexit is an episode in the long contest between rulers and the working class.

  • Jo Guldi

Transparents

When your father is trans, memoir is both personal and political.

  • Judith Levine

Underneath the Darkness

Yuri Herrera’s first two novels explore Mexican border identity. 

  • Aaron Bady

Confronting Religious Revivalism

Liberal democracy requires that we banish religion from politics.

  • Assaf Sharon
  • Avishai Margalit
with responses from
  • Michael Walzer
  • Avishai Margalit & Assaf Sharon

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Great Exploitations

States are stealing from orphans to pad their budgets. And it's legal.

  • Erik Loomis

What Does Black Lives Matter Want?

The ideas in the movement’s new manifesto would enrich our practice of democracy.

  • Robin D. G. Kelley

Pink and Blue

Many young children become obsessed with gender. How do we know which are trans?

  • Anne Fausto-Sterling

Queers Against Hate

Radical gay liberation laid the ground for the moderate legal gains of gay rights.

  • Michael Bronski

White Leghorns

On the cruelties the South doles out to animals, children, and black folks.

  • Colin Dayan

Common Property

How social insurance became confused with socialism.

  • Elizabeth Anderson

Do Government Incentives Make Us Bad Citizens?

Government incentives may make us less moral, not more.

  • John McMahon

The Forgotten State

Local government can’t fix our problems. Only big government can.

  • Mike Konczal

Paul Park’s Hidden Worlds

Paul Park’s fantasy troubles the line between fiction and reality.

  • John Crowley

Waiting at Guantánamo

After fourteen years, Mohamedou Ould Slahi may finally have a chance at freedom.

  • Henry Ace Knight

Government Under Review

Could peer review for public servants make the law more consistent?

  • Daniel E. Ho
  • Becky Elias

In Search of Thomas Jefferson

Hero or villain? It’s complicated.

  • Richard Kreitner
  • Annette Gordon-Reed
  • Peter S. Onuf

What We Owe Each Other

Egalitarianism requires not just redistribution but equal social standing.

  • Martin O’Neill

Uncertain Death

Critics take for granted that Primo Levi killed himself. But doubts remain.

  • Diego Gambetta

In Syria, Keeping the Faith

Democratic forces persist amid brutal regime violence and sectarian conflict.

  • Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Rights vs. Duties

In the age of human rights, the language of duties has withered.

  • Samuel Moyn

The Not-So-Revolutionary Single Woman

The family is changing. Will the social contract catch up?

  • Jessa Crispin

The Privatization of Hope

Among the casualties of neoliberalism is the very possibility of solidarity.

  • Ronald Aronson
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