What Are We Talking About When We Talk about Socialism?
With the election to the House of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, following up on the surprising Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, socialism is on the rise, after a long decline in ...
19 Feb 201933min
Teju Cole on Blackface and Valeria Luiselli on the Border Crisis
When depictions of Virginia politicians in blackface surfaced this month, the New Yorker contributor Teju Cole was unsurprised. “A white man of a certain age in the U.S.,” he reflects, “is found to ha...
15 Feb 201922min
To Stop the Shooting, Lupe Cruz Gets Between the People with the Guns
Conversations about gun reform are often galvanized by catastrophic mass shootings. But gun violence mostly unfolds as a matter of awful routine: domestic-partner homicides, suicides, and shootings be...
12 Feb 201914min
Is the Tide Turning on Gun Reform?
This week, the House held hearings on gun violence, the first in eight years. In the 2018 elections, gun-reform groups outspent the N.R.A.—which appears to be in financial trouble. After years of grea...
8 Feb 201941min
Marlon James Builds His Own Damn Universe
When the cast of the film “The Hobbit” was first announced, Marlon James was dismayed—though hardly surprised—by how white it was. A long-standing complaint of black fans of fantasy is that authors ca...
5 Feb 201928min
The Mueller Investigation: What We Know So Far
Washington is abuzz with rumors that the Mueller report is coming soon, and both sides are trying to strategize their next move. The reporter Adam Davidson summarizes the broad strokes of what we know...
1 Feb 201926min
John Thompson vs. American Justice
When police showed up to question John Thompson, he was worried that it was because he had sold drugs to an undercover cop. When he realized they were investigating a murder, he could only laugh: “Sh...
29 Jan 201955min
Jason Rezaian on Imprisonment in Iran
Jason Rezaian was born in California to an Iranian father and an American mother. After a failed effort to enter the Persian rug trade, he moved to Tehran to be a reporter, and was working for the Was...
25 Jan 201945min
