Books & Ideas

Walter Rodney’s Radical Legacy

On the Guyanese revolutionary’s writings on anticolonial struggle.

  • Shozab Raza
  • Noaman G. Ali

What Happened to Liberalism?

Becca Rothfeld speaks with Samuel Moyn about his book Liberalism Against Itself and why liberalism is in crisis.

  • Samuel Moyn
  • Becca Rothfeld

Salvation Now

Fifty years ago, religion met Marxism in the liberation theology movement. Its message still serves.

  • Travis Knoll

Democracy in the Real World

Theories of justice map what a good society should look like, but they generally offer few details about how to get there.

  • Thad Williamson

Can We Imagine a World Without Work?

The post-work movement reckons with reproductive labor.

  • Rachel Fraser

Literature Machines

AI-generated novels are here, but they hardly spell the end of fiction.

  • Terry Nguyen

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One Bureau under God

Jeanne Theoharis speaks with Lerone A. Martin about the white Christian legacy of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

  • Lerone A. Martin
  • Jeanne Theoharis

What Are Families For?

A liberal economist and a family abolitionist agree: our economic system makes human flourishing depend on social units it can’t sustain.

  • Will Holub-Moorman

Liberalism in Mourning

Lionel Trilling exemplifies the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.

  • Samuel Moyn

Bond Villains

How a little-understood feature of urban finance—municipal bonds—fuels racial inequality.

  • Clark Randall

Who Is History For?

What happens when radical historians write for the public.

  • David Waldstreicher

The Localist

Why did Chicago become the headquarters of free market fundamentalism? Adam Smith offers a clue.

  • Jonathan Levy

The Intimate Project of Solidarity

A conversation with Dan Berger and veteran activists Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons on the origins of Black Power and the work of coalition building.

  • nia t. evans

Why Unions Need More Democracy

In Rules to Win By, Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor reject backroom dealmaking. Rank-and-file workers are going even further.

  • Ege Yumuşak

The Fake News about Fake News

In Foolproof, psychologist Sander van der Linden compares misinformation to viral infection—and claims to have a vaccine.

  • Daniel Williams

Escape from the Market

Basic income proposals threaten the market order—which is why they keep being beaten back, even though some capitalists support them.

  • Simon Torracinta

What Is “the Jews”?

Daniel Boyarin makes the seemingly paradoxical proposal that in order to end Zionism, Jewishness should be defined as nationhood.

  • Joshua Abramson Cohen

Mass Destruction

How democratic participation in foreign policy became unthinkable.

  • Daniel Bessner

Family Feud

Family policing is deeply unjust. The nuclear family is too.

  • Will Holub-Moorman

What Will It Take to Save Democracy?

Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf says “it’s the economy, stupid.” The truth is more complicated.

  • Pranab Bardhan

A Body of One’s Own

Feminist arguments against body modification are a dead end.

  • Becca Rothfeld

Will U.S.-Israel Policies Ever Change?

They might, given growing disaffection with Israel among young American Jews.

  • Jeremy Pressman

How Not to Tell the History of Science

Two recent books force us to rethink what knowledge is, where it is located, and how it moves.

  • Eric Moses Gurevitch

The Frozen Politics of Social Security

The tone of exhausted pragmatism—even among friends of the program—is counterproductive. It is beyond time to fight fire with fire.

  • James G. Chappel
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