Sales in the railway reserve flooded the market with cheap land sold off to speculators who retained title for decades before ...

Get our latest pieces, archive selections, and editors’ notes delivered to straight to your inbox.

But putting forward a theory of progress is not only a way of settling a theoretical dispute; it’s also a move with real stakes. As confidence in collective life wanes, progress can seem not merely ...

Over a decade ago, California put a price on carbon pollution. At first glance the policy appears to be a success: since it began in 2013, emissions have declined by more than 8 percent. Today the ...

This essay is part of an Election Chronicle series in our Winter 2025 issue, Trump’s Return. I am baffled, as I was in 2016, as to why so many liberals are still shocked by Trump’s victory—and why, in ...

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, ...

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 ...

“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 ...

The idea of a privatized state sounds like a contradiction. Yet it is the state of contradiction in which we currently live. Without exaggeration, one may say that if the twentieth century was the age ...

When I was a pre-med biology student, our professor gave us a lab assignment that involved pinning an earthworm to a small piece of wood, then probing it with an electrode to observe its response. The ...

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, ...