Editors' Picks

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

What the Kerner Report Got Wrong about Policing

Bad police were not simply a symptom of racism. They were often its agents.

  • Daniel Geary

What Good Is History for African Americans?

To be useful, it has to help us think about who we should become as a nation.

  • Melvin Rogers

Rights vs. Duties

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

  • Samuel Moyn

What’s in a Name?

Yale’s president can’t make something less racist by fiat.

  • Karléh Wilson

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Should the Middle Class Fear the World’s Poor?

Plutocracy, not global competition, harms the middle class.

  • Marshall Steinbaum

The Base

With Bernie Sanders’s campaign reeling, what’s next for progressive activists?

  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Fifty Years Ago, the Government Said Black Lives Matter

The radical conclusions of the 1968 Kerner Report.

  • Julian E. Zelizer

How Stuff Works

A primer on the Standard Model.

  • Matthew Buckley

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

Winners and Losers in Brazil’s Presidential Impeachment

Is there a political coup underway?

  • Gianpaolo Baiocchi

Out with the Old, in with the Old

Lessons from Iceland’s brush with the Panama Papers.

  • Janet Elise Johnson

Still Tilting at Windmills

On the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’s death, Spain struggles to honor its literary heritage

  • Stephen Phelan

The Look of Disaster

Comic books can document the horrors of war better than photos.

  • Elizabeth Hand

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Quantum Field Theory

The mathematical language of particle physics.

  • Matthew Buckley

Chasing Lula

Bias and due process violations in Brazil’s massive corruption investigation.

  • Leonardo Avritzer

Matters of Choice

Scholar and retired Army officer Andrew Bacevich on the U.S. war for the Greater Middle East

  • Andrew J. Bacevich
  • Stephen Kinzer

On Stone Mountain

Bill Clinton, white supremacy, and the birth of the modern Democratic Party.

  • Christopher Petrella

A Vision in Concrete

Boston’s concrete modernist architecture is unsurpassed and widely despised.

  • Anthony Paletta

“We Called That Touch”

Race and the Intimate Tangle of American Experience

  • Ed Pavlić

Lillian Ross: Witness

The pathbreaking work of a not-quite-New Journalist.

  • Jacqui Shine

The Roots of Black Incarceration

A nineteenth-century memoir sheds light on the origins of the modern prison.

  • Joy James
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