“Masters of the People”: China’s New Urban Poor
Political scientists Dorothy Solinger and Mark Frazier talk to Jeffrey Wasserstrom about China’s often overlooked urban poor, and how their conditions are—and aren’t—changing.
Winter 2025
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Toxic Frontiers
The Animas River spill highlighted the toxic legacy of the Gold Rush era—an era whose abuses U.S. mining companies are now repeating abroad.
Uber for Tutors?
The race to build the biggest and baddest on-demand tutoring platform is on. But is this just another case of “old wine, new bottle” from Silicon Valley?
Wrong Turn: Learning to Drive Loses its Way
Unlike the bracing feminist essay it is based on, Learning to Drive struggles to move beyond fantasy and stereotypes.
Europe: What the Greek Memorandum Means
Progressives outside of Europe have long seen the EU as a constructive force in the world and its creature the euro as a symbol of the European social model. To read the new Greek memorandum is to lose those illusions.
Three Cubas
As the United States reopens its embassy in Cuba, we offer three accounts of the country’s aging dictatorship, and what the future could hold.
Cuba’s Democratic Left
Outside of Cuba, debate around the future of the island hangs on a misleading binary: free-market capitalism or bust. Consistently written out of the picture are Cuba’s democratic socialists—a few of whom I caught up with on a recent trip.
The Iran Deal Explained
A comprehensive guide to the nuclear agreement with Iran—and why it’s a major advance for global nuclear security.
Permanent Emergency: The Bomb and the Democratic Process
Seventy years after the bombing of Hiroshima, we still live in the mushroom cloud of secrecy and permanent emergency imposed by nuclear weapons.
Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Missing
For all his channeling of James Baldwin, Coates seems to have forgotten that black people “can’t afford despair.”
Out of Sight: The Labor Abuses Behind What We Eat
The food industry outsources production for the same reasons as other industries—to pollute and to exploit workers while minimizing resistance from locals and labor.
Lab City: The Limits of Pop-up Problem Solving
The museum world’s fad for “urban labs” shows the limits of design thinking.
What Happened to the Rock Critic?
Did Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed “Dean of Rock Critics,” help kill off his own project?
The Long Shadow of Neoconservatism
The great majority of the American political class were complicit in the deceptions that led to the Iraq war—and are desperate for the rest of the country to forget it.
A Conservative Case for the Welfare State
A longtime Republican Party insider explains why American dog-eat-dog capitalism is a disaster—even by conservatives’ own measures.
