Politics

Saving Social Security

A gimmick-free plan for long-term solvency

  • Peter A. Diamond
  • Peter R. Orszag

Selfish or Self-Aware?

Has the State of the Union address become more egocentric?

  • Claude S. Fischer

Tell Narendra Modi: Human Development is More than GDP

  • Martha C. Nussbaum

Why Obama’s $5 Billion Counterterrorism Fund Will Actually Support Terrorism

  • Alex de Waal

The Only Government I Know

How the Criminal Justice System Degrades Democratic Citizenship

  • Vesla M. Weaver

Three Assumptions that Led to Kerry’s Failure in the Middle East

The conflict doesn’t need more architects.

  • Assaf Sharon

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What Does the McCutcheon Decision Say about Democracy?

Our civics has encouraged us to think of voting as special. Roberts’s opinion suggests we have misled ourselves.

  • William Hogeland

Mourning, Victorian Style

The way New Yorkers responded to the 9/11 tragedy harkened back to the earlier Victorian-era styles.

  • Claude S. Fischer

Does Big Data Threaten Political Inequality?

A response to Archon Fung and Anthony Fowler.

  • Andrew Mayersohn

Snowden and the Ethics of Whistleblowing

Is it naïve to see whistleblowing as a form of civil disobedience?

  • William E. Scheuerman

Is Get-Out-the-Vote Bad for Democracy?

How efforts to increase voter turnout exacerbate inequality.

  • Anthony Fowler

How Feasible is a Social Democratic America?

The case for optimism, even in the face of rising inequality.

  • Daniel DiSalvo

Saving Privacy

Framing surveillance as a tradeoff between privacy and security is a dead end for democracy.

  • Reed Hundt
with responses from
  • Richard M. Stallman
  • Marvin Ammori & Adam Kern
  • Archon Fung
  • Rebecca MacKinnon
  • Jennifer Granick
  • Frank Pasquale
  • Jeremy K. Kessler
  • Bruce Schneier
  • Evgeny Morozov

Imperial Methods

Peter Matthiessen’s Orientalism.

  • Joel Whitney

Nate Silver’s Data Narratives

Data can give a sense of scale to political debate.

  • Andrew Mayersohn

Can Vladimir Putin Upend Democracy in Europe?

In the face of Putin’s rejection of democracy, Europe’s democrats must underscore the importance of the EU’s norms: social justice, sustainability, diplomacy, diversity, and freedom of movement.

  • Paul Hockenos

Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker: Can We Become a More Peaceful Species?

A recording of their debate at the Unlearning Violence conference.

  • John Berger

Letting Go of Normal

It is easy, but wrong, to see development in terms of ‘genes for X’ or a nature/nurture balance.

  • Anne Fausto-Sterling

What Journalism Can and Can’t Do for Politics

The most consequential and controversial questions in politics are not amenable to fact-checking.

  • Andrew Mayersohn

The Conscience of Syria

An interview with activist and intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh.

  • Yassin al-Haj Saleh
  • Danny Postel
  • Nader Hashemi

Tiger Couple Gets It Wrong on Immigrant Success

High-earning immigrants often come from highly educated or affluent families to begin with.

  • Stephen Steinberg

Why the Success of the Rest is Good for America

Charles Kenny's The Upside of Down.

  • Ali Wyne

Risk-Sharing

Early Americans well understood that life and making a living were precarious.

  • Claude S. Fischer

Who’s Hot?

Looking ahead to the 2014 midterm elections.

  • John Sides
  • Michael Tesler
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