It is spring in Palestine, and Eid al-Fitr has just passed. It’s customary to buy new clothes for the feast, but with people desperately short of funds, this tradition was out of reach for most this ...

Historian Stuart Schrader on the untold history of police unions—and how they helped catapult cops to new heights of power and impunity.

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, ...

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 ...

More than a century before Zohran Mamdani declared he wanted a New York City network of grocery stores “focused on keeping prices low,” socialists in Spain were furious about a network of grocery ...

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 ...

This essay appears in print in Thinking in a Pandemic. Recent history tells us a lot about how epidemics unfold, how outbreaks spread, and how they are controlled. We also know a good deal about ...

A little-known fact is that during the Civil War, the Union Army initially did not rescue or protect Black people they perceived to be disabled. Historian Jim Downs explains that this is because they ...

On February 2, 1977, Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein died in his New York apartment. Hussein had been born forty-one years earlier in Musmus, a town not far from Nazareth. Politics for Hussein, Edward ...

In the 1970s, a group of feminists collaborating under the banner Wages for Housework (including Selma James, Silvia Federici, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa) came up with a remarkably precise dictum to ...

Is poetry still possible? The question may strike us as impertinent: of course it is still written. But in some sense it remains a real question what poetry can do—and how it should be—at a time of ...

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, ...