Books & Ideas

What Is This Nation?

Palantir’s military-industrial plan for America.

  • David Austin Walsh

Free Markets and Fixed Natures

How neoliberals fell in love with “human nature”—the glue that still unites the divergent factions of the new right.

  • Quinn Slobodian

Lost Liverpool

The city was at the vanguard of working-class obsolescence. How should we understand its fate?

  • Emily Baughan

The Limits of Professional-Class Liberalism

How professionals remade the Democratic Party, narrowing its political vision.

  • Simon Torracinta
  • Brent Cebul
  • Lily Geismer
  • Dylan Gottlieb
  • Nicole Hemmer
  • Danielle Wiggins

Small Wasn’t Beautiful

How the left embraced “ethical consumption” and gave up on the state.

  • Udi Greenberg

The Reality of Settler Colonialism

Writers like Adam Kirsch mock the idea to demonize critics of Israel. The phenomenon itself remains.

  • Samuel Hayim Brody

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Politics All the Way Down

Critics are right: the algorithms that increasingly run the world can be dangerous. Are human systems always better?

  • Lily Hu

The New Old Warfare

The self-serving myths of a new wave of defense tech, from Palantir’s Gotham to Israel’s Gospel.

  • Sophia Goodfriend

To Whom Does the World Belong?

The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT.

  • Alexander Hartley

Becoming Lula

How a metalworker became perhaps the most voted-for person on the planet—and a model for the future of the left.

  • Gianpaolo Baiocchi

The Parenting Panic

Contrary to both far right and mainstream center-left, there’s no epidemic of chosen childlessness.

  • Aaron Bady

Against False Universals

Seyla Benhabib’s 2024 Adorno Prize lecture.

  • Seyla Benhabib

Abortion’s Future

Activists, not elites, are leading the way forward in a world without Roe.

  • Judith Levine

Can Social Democracy Win Again?

The tangled legacy of the Swedish experiment.

  • Simon Torracinta

The Politics of Price

How accounting protocols undermine public goals—from decolonization to climate action.

  • Kevin P. Donovan

What Turned Poor White Counties Red?

Arlie Russell Hochschild blames an emotional blindness to facts, erasing the Democrats’ deep failings.

  • Elizabeth Catte

Cooling Tensions in a Warming World

Lessons from the new alliances between labor and climate activism.

  • Erik Loomis

Mapping Injury

Sunaura Taylor on what the environmental and disability movements can learn from one another.

  • Sunaura Taylor
  • Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

Queering the State

How should LGBT activism think about state power?

  • Samuel Clowes Huneke
  • Hugh Ryan

Psychic Numbing

For Robert Jay Lifton, treating veterans’ trauma was an antiwar tool. How did PTSD, the diagnosis he helped create, come to accommodate state violence?

  • Hannah Proctor

The Summers of Theory

How it rose, fell, and may rise again.

  • Peter E. Gordon

Who’s Afraid of Frantz Fanon?

Long decried by liberals and conservatives alike, the Martinican psychiatrist remains one of the most piercing critics of colonialism.

  • Sam Klug

Freeing Free Trade

Is there anything left to anti-imperial visions of global commerce?

  • Kate Yoon

Is the State Here to Stay?

States are exerting greater control over capital. In the face of climate change, it may be too little, too late.

  • Jonathan S. Blake
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