The work of art—and the work of making art—in an age increasingly hostile to it.

Leading the insurgence against the military regime was the Somali National Movement (SNM), founded on a nonalignment platform ...

This February, the United States and Israel started a war with Iran, massively destabilizing the Middle East. A special ...

Ali Kadivar is Associate Professor of Sociology and International Studies at Boston College and a Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. He is author of Popular ...

Introducing our Spring 2026 issue.

The elite delusions fueling the violence of the present, at home and abroad—in the Middle East, Ukraine, and beyond.

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 ...

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, ...

This essay appears in print in Thinking in a Pandemic. Recent history tells us a lot about how epidemics unfold, how outbreaks spread, and how they are controlled. We also know a good deal about ...

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, ...

Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) marked its eighth week as a New York Times bestseller the same week that Trump publicly instructed a white militia group to “stand back ...

Terry Bouricius remembers the moment he converted to democracy by lottery. A bookish Vermonter, now sixty-eight, he was elected to the State House in 1990 after working for years as a public official ...