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, ...

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 ...

The images inspired by Michael Javen Fortner’s new book, Black Silent Majority, are revealing. A New Yorker review featured a graphic rendering of somber black men clad in orange jumpsuits imprisoned ...

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 ...

Sensing an opportunity, the Trump campaign amplified messages that linked Black Lives Matter (BLM) with looting and violence. In early September, in the aftermath of a BLM protest marred by ...

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 ...

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 ...

Roger Ebert once defined a blockbuster movie sequel as a “filmed deal.” The literary equivalent is the official biography. A towering ego, obsessed with the judgment of history, hand selects a ...

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 ...

This past April, the FBI made an admission that was nothing short of catastrophic for the field of forensic science. In an unprecedented display of repentance, the Bureau announced that, for years, ...

U.S. history is a strange, exceptional field of play where, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s famous sign-off from Lake Wobegon, all the revolutions are strong, all the revolutionaries are kind, and ...

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 ...