Politics

The Electability Trap

The dangers behind focusing on whether a candidate is “electable.”

  • Emily Cain

Crafting U.S.-specific Solutions

Work is already being done to disrupt structural inequalities.

  • Kelly Dittmar

Race Matters Too

Women of color make distinctive contributions to public policy.

  • Kerry L. Haynie

The Battle for Women’s Representation Starts in Our Homes

Women need intellectual space and free time to participate in politics.

  • Dawn Langan Teele

Changing Gendered Expectations

We can’t vote our way out of gendered divisions of labor.

  • Suzanne Dovi

Persuasion, Not Quotas

Slow, incremental changes are just as important as quotas.

  • Alice Eagly

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What Does It Take to Get Women Elected?

If women’s suffrage was the battle of the twentieth century, women’s representation will be the battle of the twenty-first.

  • Jennifer M. Piscopo
with responses from
  • Alice Eagly
  • Suzanne Dovi
  • Dawn Langan Teele
  • Kerry L. Haynie
  • Kelly Dittmar
  • Emily Cain

The Death and Rebirth of American Internationalism

Internationalists are plotting their return, but they still haven’t learned from the failure of liberal universalism.

  • Edward Fishman

Democracy for Losers

Some candidates who lose elections strengthen democracy, but others threaten the democratic system itself.

  • Jan-Werner Müller

From the Editors: The Politics of Care

  • Deborah Chasman
  • Joshua Cohen

New Book: The Politics of Care

From COVID-19 to Black Lives Matter. Order our latest book now.

Pigs and Capital

The meat business has become a vast, fragile beast teetering on the brink of ecological and financial ruin.

  • Troy Vettese

Why Do Authoritarians Win?

Not by repudiating democracy but by simulating it, a new book argues.

  • William E. Scheuerman

The Problem Isn’t Just Police—It’s Politics

Sociologist Alex Vitale explains how the U.S. policing crisis begins with politics—the decision to embrace neoliberal austerity and to turn the social problems it creates over to police.

  • Alex Vitale
  • Scott Casleton

Confederates in the Capitol

The National Statuary Collection announced the unification of the former slave economy’s emotional heartland with the heart of national government.

  • William Hogeland

A Perfect Storm of Vulnerabilities Could Determine the 2020 Election

Here’s what we should do.

  • Jake Braun

Power over Policing

A special project from Boston Review. 

America’s Long War on Children and Families

A new book shows how Trump’s family separation policy belongs to a much longer history of child-taking by the U.S. government.

  • Paul M. Renfro

A New Age of Protest Music

Through online fan communities and digital platforms like TikTok, popular music is finding powerful new ways to shape everyday activism, protest, and resistance.

  • Byrd McDaniel

The Politics of the Mask

Today we face the paradox of states simultaneously criminalizing masks—because of protests—and mandating them because of COVID-19. In this interview, social theorist AK Thompson explores the history of masks in protests and why rioting is politically effective.

  • AK Thompson
  • Clare O’Connor

The Future of U.S. Global Leadership

The assumption that only the United States can lead the free world increasingly looks imperiled. What would foreign policy look like without it?

  • Jeremy Shapiro

A Politics of the Future

Mourning the elderly lost to COVID-19.

  • Simon Waxman

Some Statues Are Like Barbed Wire

Activists fighting to remove statues of slavers and colonizers understand better than most how public memorials can be a form of violence.

  • Jonathan Beecher Field

Protest, Passion, Politics

The reissue of Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism invites a new generation to reflect on what it means to live a life of political commitment.

  • Alan Wald
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