Uncertainty about where we find ourselves in political time—“back to the future,” back to the GOP of 1989, or back to Germany ...

His memorial service in Glendale, Arizona, was attended not just by Trump and other high-ranking officials in his administration but also by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, Daily Wire podcaster Matt ...

This is the first installment of a new column by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. It appears in print in our Fall 2025 issue; subscribe to get a copy. In 1962, eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell received a series ...

I first arrived in Frankfurt, in this city of immigrants and exiles, in the fall of 1980, as a foreign student and scholar whose life was forever changed by her encounter with it. In Frankfurt I met ...

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, ...

On the eve of the November 1938 midterm elections, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a forceful radio address. “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and ...

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, ...

A version of this essay appears in our Summer 2025 issue under the headline “The Mamdani Model.” Become a member to get a copy. While masked, heavily armed, unidentified men are grabbing people off ...

“Call me Caitlyn.” With this phrase, emblazoned on Vanity Fair’s June 2015 cover, Caitlyn Jenner revealed her transgender identity to the world. But these words were not only a revelation; they also ...

When, early in Donald Trump’s presidency, senior advisor Steve Bannon promised that the administration would fight every day for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” most Americans ...

When I was a pre-med biology student, our professor gave us a lab assignment that involved pinning an earthworm to a small piece of wood, then probing it with an electrode to observe its response. The ...