In their new book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that American liberals have ironically succumbed to a conservative worldview, in the original sense of “conservative.” Instead of ...

When I was a pre-med biology student, our professor gave us a lab assignment that involved pinning an earthworm to a small piece of wood, then probing it with an electrode to observe its response. The ...

This essay appears in our Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. In August 1936, after a failed coup against the Second Spanish Republic, Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces seized the city of ...

In June 1982, as employment in the U.S. auto industry continued to plummet, two white autoworkers, one of them recently laid off, started harassing a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin in a ...

The United States has never been “a nation of immigrants.” It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is, primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots, ...

We live in an era of intersecting crises—some new, some old but newly visible. At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has already caused nearly 500,000 deaths in the United States alone, with ...

A number of recent books have put the methods of the social sciences in the service of understanding Trump, his movement, and his enablers, from Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum’s A Lot of People ...

According to the right, a specter is haunting the United States: the specter of critical race theory (CRT). On the eve of losing the presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order in September ...

One of the least interesting things a woman can do vis-à-vis sex is consent to it—yet lately, we seem to have less to say about female erotics than we do about male abuses. On the one hand, it is not ...

When James Baldwin visited San Francisco in 1963 to film a documentary about U.S. racism, he encountered neighborhoods in turmoil: the city was seizing properties through eminent domain, razing them, ...

Two years ago this month, activists from the Global Women’s Strike convened a virtual conference. Selma James, then nearing her ninetieth birthday, was one of several speakers. “We are carers,” she ...

The clinic was open once a week. It saw patients in a borrowed space near enough that I could walk to it, even on a bad day. Walking slow in my cognitive fog, only once did I have to pause, leaning ...