Last April, as the Trump administration gleefully decimated the federal government, police officers received a love letter in the form of an executive order promising to “strengthen” and “unleash” ...

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; ...

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, ...

Events of the past decade have prompted frenzied discussion of the state of democracy across the globe. In countries across Europe, Latin America, and Asia—as well as, of course, in the United ...

This past April, the FBI made an admission that was nothing short of catastrophic for the field of forensic science. In an unprecedented display of repentance, the Bureau announced that, for years, ...

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, ...

For ten years the American Civil Liberties Union, where I am a deputy legal director, has been documenting cases in which an institution or individual seeks to violate an antidiscrimination law ...

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, ...

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 ...

Roger Ebert once defined a blockbuster movie sequel as a “filmed deal.” The literary equivalent is the official biography. A towering ego, obsessed with the judgment of history, hand selects a ...

Last August the New York Times Magazine released a special issue they called the 1619 Project, which uses the 400th anniversary of the arrival of “20 and odd” enslaved Africans in Virginia to recast ...