Books & Ideas

Executive Secrecy

If we want to check presidential power—and check it we must—then it is essential that we resist claims to executive secrecy.

  • William Howell
  • Mariah Zeisberg

Preserving the Self

The Political Economy of Attention

  • George Scialabba

The Folly of Neoliberal Prison Reform

The demands of justice and human rights compel thoroughgoing change, whatever the cost-benefit analysis returns.

  • Marie Gottschalk

A Good, Bad, Hard, Easy Life

A new collection of Lead Belly’s recordings.

  • Dave Byrne

An Extra Life

Jorie Graham's From the New World

  • Katie Peterson

American Cynicism

And its cure.

  • Jess Row

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How Patent Law Created Inventors

Alexander Graham Bell and telecom’s founding myth.

  • Graeme Gooday

The Seduction of Normalcy

On Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.

  • Diana Arterian

Decide for Yourself

Truth in the films of Errol Morris.

  • Randolph Lewis

Life Sings with Many Voices

Eduardo Galeano began as a propagandist, convinced of a single dogmatic truth. He became an artist.

  • Nathan J. Robinson

Ruin

Online shaming is a cathartic alternative to real efforts at social change.

  • Meghan O’Gieblyn

The Rise of the Anti-Muslim Fringe

— and how it became mainstream.

  • Aziz Z. Huq

Dead Man Talking

Brazil's Spiritists Redefine Religion

  • Laura Premack

Protesting Too Much

The trouble with Black Power revisionism.

  • Randall L. Kennedy

The End

The politics of American apocalypse.

  • Meghan O’Gieblyn

Wounded Women

The assumption of female vulnerability threatens to invigorate the sexist evils it aims to combat.

  • Jessa Crispin

Into Darkness

Nature, Risk, and the Birth of Creativity

  • Jenny Hendrix

Grassroots Isn’t Always Best

Community development and its woes.

  • Merlin Chowkwanyun

Did Christianity Create Liberalism?

On Larry Siedentrop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism.

  • Samuel Moyn

A Bigger Tent

Can Richard Trumka Save the Labor Movement?

  • Amy B. Dean

A Matter of the Skies

More birds appear. Bending against the cold, I watch, name, and name again.

  • Dave Byrne

The Virtue of Scientific Thinking

Scientists have discarded the moral authority that previously accrued to their vocation.

  • Steven Shapin

The Rhetoric of Cowardice

Recovering its usage.

  • Kyle Williams

What SAT Critics Miss

By and large, admissions tests register rather than create inequality.

  • Jeffrey Aaron Snyder
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