This essay is featured in our Summer 2026 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. Climate politics are in a very weird place right now. On the one hand, current events would seem to be fertile ground—perhaps ...

This essay is featured in our Summer 2026 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. In early April, a committee of ten professors submitted a “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the ...

Has any single book drawn more Americans leftward over the last half century than A People’s History of the United States? Howard Zinn was not the first to write about Bartolomé de las Casas, the ...

This essay is featured in our Summer 2026 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. Eleven years ago, the mathematician Stefaan Vaes, upon receiving the prestigious Francqui Prize for young scientists from the ...

Older people, we often hear, have too much power. They are hoarding homes, money, and jobs to the detriment of younger people who can’t get their lives started. They are hoarding political power as ...

Political judgment takes place within political time. And political time is less a matter of chronology than of genre. What kind of moment are we living through? Is our system of government undergoing ...

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, ...

“The personal is political” was a reality for me long before it became the mantra of Second Wave feminism in the United States. In 1951, when I was ten years old, my father, Samuel Wallach, a New York ...

In September 1974, at a protest in London, Stuart Hall delivered a speech in support of fellow Caribbean-born radical intellectual Walter Rodney. After being offered a professorship at the University ...

Down a tree-lined street near my grandmother’s house in Tehran is a mosque where locals go to chat, rest, and sometimes even pray. In the back of the mosque, behind a small library, is an office for a ...

Sixty years ago, Life photographer John Dominis traveled to eastern Kentucky, where he captured shocking and raw photographs of deprivation—the target of President Lyndon Johnson’s recently announced ...

In 1980 Frances Gabe applied for a patent for a self-cleaning house. The design was based on her own home, which she had worked on for more than a decade. Each room had a sprinkler system installed; ...