Fall 2025

Daniel A. Bell engages in the timely and worthy task of looking at an important social issue in East Asia—the employment of domestic workers—from a Confucian perspective. In Hong Kong, for example, live-in foreign domestic helpers (most domestic helpers in …

Alexis de Tocqueville was so impressed with American jurisprudence that he called jury duty a free school for learning personal rights and practical law. But for decades being summoned to jury duty taught me different lessons—how to game the system …

I have never served on a jury, but I have been a potential juror, waiting in the basement of the Trenton courthouse with many others. Four or five times I was called to sit there, for a couple of days …

The collapse of the credit markets over the last year has hit more than just the homebuilding and mortgage sectors of the economy. As interest rates increased, private equity, or “PE,” an important new form of financial capital, was also …

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

It was a drug deal gone bad. Two white men from the suburbs drive to Harlem one night to buy cocaine. There’s a hassle, a shot, and one of them ends up dead. The judge in the state criminal court …

When I worked as a regular newspaper columnist, I absorbed two informal, folkloric strictures on subject matter: No columns based on conversations with cab drivers and none touting jury service as a magisterium of democracy, where one’s faith in the …

About ten years ago, a close friend came to visit me in Hong Kong. This friend—now director of a center for ethics at a prestigious American university—seemed surprised when informed that my family had hired a live-in domestic helper to …

Fire and flood. We call them natural disasters, but a closer look suggests a human hand at work as well. Three years before Katrina hit the gulf coast, Mike Parker, the former head of the Army Corps of Engineers, warned …

A determined offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East, and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas are not the protagonists, the contested terrains are not the Galilee and southern Lebanon or …

Joanne Barkan, Paul Berman, Susan Cheever, Nicolaus Mills, Maxine Phillips, Ruth Rosen, Jim Sleeper, Michael Walzer, and Darryl Lorrenzo Wellington report from the field.

The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why by Jabari Asim, and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy.