Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Adam Gaffney, David U. Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler

The Only Way to Fix US Health Care

The evidence confirms what our patients regard as common sense: copays and deductibles cause people to skip needed care and hence suffer poorer health, and even mortal consequences.

November 7, 2024 issue

Christine Henneberg

Calculated Risks

Since the overturning of Roe, it has once again become a subversive act to provide medical care for women as though their lives are as valuable as men’s.

November 7, 2024 issue

Christopher R. Browning

Hitler’s Enablers

The complicity of conservative nationalists in the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 offers disturbing parallels to the current American political situation.

November 7, 2024 issue

David S. Reynolds

Grant vs. the Klan

New books reconsider how Ulysses S. Grant became a forceful defender of the rights of African Americans after the Civil War.

October 17, 2024 issue

Linda Colley

A Constitution Nowhere and Everywhere

Despite the absence of a single codified document, there is a long tradition of writing about the United Kingdom’s constitutional history.

October 17, 2024 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

What the Ocean Holds

Most of our planet’s biosphere exists in the dark of the deep ocean. Will we protect it? Or will we cash it in without concern for the harm we’re causing?

October 17, 2024 issue

Matthew Desmond

A Prophet for the Poor

In order to build a mass movement for economic justice, Reverend William Barber argues, we need to let go of the idea that poverty is an exclusively Black or urban issue.

October 3, 2024 issue

Kathryn Hughes

An Entry of One’s Own

A collection of excerpts from women’s diaries written over the past four centuries offers a vast range of human experience and a subtle counterhistory.

October 3, 2024 issue

Great Lives

Marie-Antoinette; unfinished portrait by Alexander Kucharsky, 1791–1792

Lynn Hunt

Marie Antoinette: Why Was She So Hated?

How Marie Antoinette tried to save the monarchy.

November 5, 2020 issue

Fintan O’Toole

A Moral Witness

Martha Gellhorn’s letters to her lovers and intimate friends involve a remarkable feat of reportage on the war within Gellhorn herself

October 8, 2020 issue

Michael Gorra

Young Woman from the Provinces

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work

February 27, 2020 issue

The Latest

Martha C. Nussbaum

Reports from the Slaughterhouse

A century after Upton Sinclair exposed the inhumane and unhygienic conditions of Chicago’s stockyards, life for animals in America’s factory farms and slaughterhouses is still gruesome.

December 19, 2024 issue

David Cole

Gender-Affirming Care & the Courts

The Supreme Court will rule this term on whether a Tennessee law denying minors treatment for gender dysphoria discriminates on the basis of sex.

December 19, 2024 issue

Ian Tattersall

Look Who’s Talking

When did our first linguistic ancestor emerge, and how did the transition from a nonlinguistic to a linguistic state take place?

December 19, 2024 issue

John J. Lennon

Tangled Justice

A new book examines the complex relationship between forgiveness and justice through the story of Paula Cooper, who was sentenced to death at the age of sixteen.

December 19, 2024 issue

Robert Kuttner

The Import of Exports

Free trade once aligned with America’s economic and security interests, but in recent years experts have suggested pulling back from globalism and rebuilding the domestic economy.

December 19, 2024 issue

R.J.W. Evans

Centers on the Margins

The dark history of Buczacz, an ordinary town in western Ukraine, exemplifies the fate of Jews in the vast marginal territories of East-Central Europe.

December 19, 2024 issue

James Gleick

Bad Readers

AI chatbots have been trained on trillions of words—but all in the service of plausibility over truth.

November 23, 2024

Erin Maglaque

Soundscapes of the Silenced

In late Renaissance Florence one in five women lived behind institutional walls whose rule was sensory mortification. Historians are struggling to recover their inexpressible secrets.

December 5, 2024 issue

Magda Teter

Jewish Middlemen, Archival Myopia

The story of two Jewish trading families during the last decades of the Regency of Algiers is skewed by being told through the perspectives of only European and American actors.

December 5, 2024 issue

Tim Flannery

The Sense of an Endling

In the early nineteenth century, the idea of species extinction was an alien concept. That changed after an expedition to Iceland in search of the last of the great auks.

December 5, 2024 issue