What happens next and how to take things seriously are difficulties these texts have something to tell us about—something we need, still, to learn. This account of these three notoriously difficult ...

Contrary to the Obama administration, U.S. health care spending isn’t high because Americans use too much medicine. The real culprit is our fragmented and privatized system. For more than a decade, ...

In Chu T’ien-wen’s 1994 novel Notes of a Desolate Man, the narrator recalls the death a decade earlier of French philosopher Michel Foucault: The unfinished history of sexual consciousness stopped ...

On the eve of the November 1938 midterm elections, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a forceful radio address. “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and ...

According to a familiar story, science was born as a pastime of seventeenth-century European gentlemen, who built air pumps, traded telescopes, and measured everything from the size of the earth to ...

A version of this essay appears in our Summer 2025 issue under the headline “The Mamdani Model.” Become a member to get a copy. While masked, heavily armed, unidentified men are grabbing people off ...

In an open lot on Detroit’s Eastside, a small red and sky-blue refrigerator hums underneath a hand-made shelter. On this windy February afternoon, Alyssa Rogers, one of the cofounders of Detroit ...

Fifty years ago, in July 1965, a social science study with a prosaic title—“The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”—was leaked to the press. Its author was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a young and ...

A decade before his assassination at the hands of a nationalist in 1914, French socialist Jean Jaurès completed a historical work that radically changed the study of the French Revolution. Where ...

Every morning in the United States 2.2 million people wake up in our nation’s prisons and jails, making us the world leader in incarceration. Another 4.4 million people currently live under some form ...

Would it surprise you to learn that students attending traditional, district-run public schools outperform their peers in charter schools and private schools? That is the bold claim at the heart of ...

What responsibility does the artist have to society? Speaking at Amherst College in 1963, John F. Kennedy gave one answer to that perpetually nagging question. For a politician it was a highly unusual ...