Uncertainty about where we find ourselves in political time—“back to the future,” back to the GOP of 1989, or back to Germany ...

In Crito and Phaedo, Plato takes this alliance between Socrates and poetry further, attributing to Socrates direct acts of ...

I grew up on the short story “Toba Tek Singh,” an Urdu satire on the Partition. While the story’s protagonist is a Sikh man, for whom the story is named, the character that stuck with me most was an ...

One of the most commonly encountered claims about international politics today concerns the transition from a “Westphalian” to a “post-Westphalian” era. Writers across a wide range of media 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 ...

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, ...

This essay appears in print in our Fall 2025 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. “The personal is the political” was a reality for me long before it became the mantra of Second Wave feminism in the United ...

As protesters demand justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery, calls for police and prison abolition have gained unprecedented traction. A majority of the Minneapolis ...

“Very fine people”—fathers, husbands, and sons, as well as mothers, wives, and daughters—have always been central to the work of white supremacy. White supremacy is a language of unease. It does not ...

In 1601, as a succession of failing harvests left people jobless and hungry, and vagrants roamed across England, the Elizabethan poor laws were established to reassert control over the population. The ...

This essay appears in our print issue, On Solidarity. As I watched Pat Buchanan address the Republican National Convention three decades ago, I cried. I can still see his doughy face and fixed ...

In 1947 Julian Huxley, English evolutionary theorist and director-general of UNESCO, wrote Mohandas Gandhi to ask him to contribute an essay to a collection of philosophical reflections on human ...