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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 ...

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 Andrea Dworkin died of heart disease in 2005, at age fifty-eight, U.S. feminism lost its most inflammatory voice. Between Woman Hating (1974), her transcultural examination of women in history ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A number of recent books have put the methods of the social sciences in the service of understanding Trump, his movement, and his enablers, from Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum’s A Lot of People ...

When James Baldwin visited San Francisco in 1963 to film a documentary about U.S. racism, he encountered neighborhoods in turmoil: the city was seizing properties through eminent domain, razing them, ...

The standard history of humanity goes something like this. Roughly 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens first evolved somewhere on the African continent. Over the next 100,000 to 150,000 years, ...

Reparations have seen a resurgence of interest in recent years, stemming from a variety of sources. Perhaps most familiarly, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s influential 2014 essay in the Atlantic, “The Case for ...

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, ...