I learned early about the intrusive operations of state power in the daily routines of domestic life. For years, we all breathed a general air of anxiety.

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 ...

I would like to stage a fight between two different accounts of the current political landscape—what’s been called the “post-truth” era, the infodemic, the end of democracy, or perhaps most accurately ...

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, ...

Last August the New York Times Magazine released a special issue they called the 1619 Project, which uses the 400th anniversary of the arrival of “20 and odd” enslaved Africans in Virginia to recast ...

The 2014 English publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century made the French economist Thomas Piketty a household name. The bestselling book, and the discussions that surrounded its release, ...

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 ...

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 ...

When Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar was attacked in March for “invoking the anti-Semitic trope of ‘dual loyalty’” in her criticisms of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the ...

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, ...

Editors’ Note: Read responses to this essay by epidemiologists Marc Lipsitch and John Ioannidis, as well as a final response by Jonathan Fuller. All these pieces appear in print in Thinking in a ...