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.

The Italian novelist Italo Calvino was unusually optimistic about the invention of a “literature machine.” In his 1967 essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” he imagines a computer that would be “capable of ...

Last week U.S. Vice President Mike Pence sought to reassure the country that there was no need to fear a “second wave” of coronavirus infections. Two days later Anthony S. Fauci, director of the ...

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, ...

"It's the opposite of / Baroque, so I want / none of it,” Angie Estes declares in a poem called “Sans Serif,” from Chez Nous (2004). That brisk and irregularly rhymed poem announces Estes’s opposition ...

In 1980 Frances Gabe applied for a patent for a self-cleaning house. The design was based on her own home, which she had worked on for more than a decade. Each room had a sprinkler system installed; ...

Science is under fire as never before in the United States. Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump and his Republican allies dismiss the findings of health experts as casually as those of ...

Robinson can serve as a resource for thinking through our current fraught politics. Ultimately it would be graduate students in the 1990s who would rediscover the work and bring it to a wider audience ...

When Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar was attacked in March for “invoking the anti-Semitic trope of ‘dual loyalty’” in her criticisms of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the ...

Every morning in the United States 2.2 million people wake up in our nation’s prisons and jails, making us the world leader in incarceration. Another 4.4 million people currently live under some form ...

Most Americans never encounter the simple, brute fact of U.S. military supremacy. Bases are far away; wars in remote places are waged remotely; amid the general fragmentation of social life, those who ...