One 2012 Obama for America training deck that seems ancient now describes staging locations as “temporary field offices for a campaign—either at a home, business, or public space” that are “used to ...

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, ...

This past February, I noticed that one of the cameras at my parents’ apartment had gone dark. I scanned through the footage: backward quickly, until I saw my father shuffling about, like a stop-motion ...

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 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 ...

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 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, ...

Last October a horrifying story saturated local news in Philadelphia. A woman had been sexually assaulted on a train while surrounded by other passengers, and according to police, the onlookers saw ...

There are few institutions as culturally sacrosanct and legally violated as the American family. Each year child welfare authorities separate half a million children from their parents. The system ...

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 ...

Terry Bouricius remembers the moment he converted to democracy by lottery. A bookish Vermonter, now sixty-eight, he was elected to the State House in 1990 after working for years as a public official ...

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 ...