Two new books examine the ordinary roots of our extraordinary regime of high-tech monitoring. | Continue reading
Through an assault on administrative agencies, the Supreme Court is systematically eroding the legal basis of effective governance. | Continue reading
How a new class of "salts"—radicals who take jobs to help unionization—is boosting the organizing efforts of long-term workers. | Continue reading
Decades of biological research haven't improved diagnosis or treatment. We should look to society, not to the brain. | Continue reading
A sweeping new history of humanity upends the story of civilization, inviting us to imagine how our own societies could be radically different. | Continue reading
No other artist more perfectly anticipated the banal strangeness of life in the twenty-first century. | Continue reading
How microeconomic reasoning took over the very institutions of American governance. | Continue reading
Beyond carbon emissions and safety, the debate must also confront how the choices we make now constrain the kind of world we can build in the future. | Continue reading
Images seized from enslaved people are not private property to be owned, but ancestors to be cared for. | Continue reading
Beyond carbon emissions and safety, the debate must also confront how the choices we make now constrain the kind of world we can build in the future. | Continue reading
Conspiracy theories like QAnon are ultimately a social problem rather than a cognitive one. We should blame politics, not the faulty reasoning of individuals. | Continue reading
In a political season of dog whistles, we must be attentive to how talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else. | Continue reading
The neofascist assault on democracy is a last-ditch effort on the part of neoliberal capitalism to rescue itself from crisis. The only solution is a decisive retreat from globalized finance. | Continue reading
Sovereign states have been mythologized as the natural unit of political order. History shows how new they are—and how we can think beyond them. | Continue reading
Knowing takes radical collaboration: an openness to being persuaded as much as an eagerness to persuade. | Continue reading
Recent efforts to commemorate Laura Bassi—a pioneering physicist in eighteenth-century Italy—often say more about us than the world of women in science. | Continue reading
Mainstream economics ignores the massive government interventions that “free market” capitalism requires. | Continue reading
For economist Albert O. Hirschman, social planning meant creative experimentation rather than theoretical certainty. We could use more of his improvisatory optimism today. | Continue reading
Sovereign states have been mythologized as the natural unit of political order. History shows how new they are—and how we can think beyond them. | Continue reading
Race and the transformation of criminal justice. | Continue reading
Attempts to cast Said as the consummate New York intellectual miss the point that his milieu was one of global, and specifically Palestinian, anticolonial struggle. | Continue reading
The more someone knows about us, the more they can influence us. We can wield democratic power only if our privacy is protected. | Continue reading
Fascist politics exploits freedom of speech for authoritarian ends. | Continue reading
Philosopher Karl Popper famously asked how to tell the two apart. His answer—falsifiability—hasn’t aged well, but the effort lives on. | Continue reading
Home DNA ancestry kits include no ancestors, instead comparing customers to other present-day people based on assumptions about race and ethnicity. So what are they actually selling? | Continue reading
Philosopher Karl Popper famously asked how to tell the two apart. His answer—falsifiability—hasn’t aged well, but the effort lives on. | Continue reading
Forgiveness is a public good, but it is doled out unevenly. Justice demands we widen its reach beyond the select few. | Continue reading
Much maligned as a mere tactician of power, Machiavelli was in fact a philosopher of the people. His critique of oligarchic domination remains essential today. | Continue reading
Our understanding of Malcolm X is inextricably linked to his autobiography, but newly discovered materials force us to reexamine his legacy. | Continue reading
There are two problems with anger: it is morally corrupting, and it is completely correct. | Continue reading
For a century, critics of all political stripes have challenged the role of science in society. Repairing distrust today requires confronting those arguments head on. | Continue reading
Pestilence and plague have often prompted waves of apocalyptic thinking, calling into question the steady march of progress in human history. | Continue reading
The French Algerian writer steadfastly defended democracy and humanity against dogmatic ideologies of all stripes. We need to read and reread him today. | Continue reading
Many reject privatization for its distributional consequences. The deeper problem is that it threatens the very foundation of political legitimacy. | Continue reading
Ron Howard’s Netflix adaptation of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ continues a long tradition of seeing hillbillies as a symbol of pristine American whiteness. It’s the same nostalgia Trump has mobilized on the far right. | Continue reading
Biden should rejoin the Paris Agreement, but diplomacy isn't enough. To decarbonize the economy, we must integrate bottom-up, local experimentation with top-down, global cooperation. | Continue reading
Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with her readers was a mutually demanding collaboration. | Continue reading
A new history charts the global legacy of Fordist mass production, tracing its appeal to political formations on both the left and the right. | Continue reading
Waiting to ensure uninterrupted power for everyone as we transition away from fossil fuels will cost too much time—and too many lives. | Continue reading
Global trade, enslaved labor, and colonial warfare created demands for medicines that would work for anyone, anywhere. That pressure to view patients as interchangeable remains with us today. | Continue reading
Lucia Moholy helped create the visual language of the Bauhaus, but when she fled the Nazis her work was stolen by Walter Gropius. With interest renewed by the Bauhaus centennial, will she finally receive recognition? | Continue reading
The dead weight of decades of bad economics remains. | Continue reading
While existentialist thinking has much wisdom to offer about anxiety, contingency, and death, we must also think concretely about politics and institutions. | Continue reading
Pulse oximeters give biased results for people with darker skin. The consequences could be serious. | Continue reading
Monarch butterflies may be gone in thirty years. Saving them seems apolitical, but environmentalists have landed in the sights of drug cartels, illegal loggers, Trump supporters, and even clandestine avocado farmers. | Continue reading
Huge investors like BlackRock are forcing corporations to take action on emissions. But what does their power mean for democracy? | Continue reading
A new biography reveals the full scope of John Maynard Keynes’s critique of unfettered capitalism, emphasizing the economist’s larger philosophical vision of the good life. | Continue reading