Winter 2025

In his much-anticipated speech on climate change, President Obama proposed smart, modest policies that would help decrease greenhouse gas emissions through support for renewable energy development and increased energy efficiency measures, prepare the country for the climate change that is …

Political leaders and the news media have presented the sudden reversing of a thirty-five-year decline in the U.S. production of fossil fuels as a sign of the recovery of the country’s national independence. To others the bonanza threatens not a newfound independence but a deepening dependency.

Richard Hell left behind the idea of self-cultivation as an art form—that discerning judgment constitutes who we are or can be at our best. He also warned of how so much revolt can form a narcissistic prison.

Richard Dienst’s The Bonds of Debt tells a series of intertwined but also divergent stories, all drawing us deeper into the mysteries of social life under capitalism but each gripping in its own distinct way. It’s not every writer in the Marxist tradition who has the courage to enter into mysteries he may not be able to elucidate, to tell stories that may not end by cohering as fully as he would like.

The intersection of class and race at Winged Foot golf course was pretty hard to miss. For me, it began to raise a few questions about how wealth and income is distributed in America and who, in the majestic equality of the law, gets to sleep under the stars and in sand traps after a bad night with the bottle.

There is no conceivable benchmark by which one could sustain the argument that Americans—especially corporations and the wealthy—are taxed too much.

Margarethe von Trotta’s new film, Hannah Arendt, revisits the furor provoked by Arendt’s analysis of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. “Within the New York intellectual world,” wrote Irving Howe, Eichmann in Jerusalem “provoked divisions that would never be entirely healed.”

Gar Alperovitz argues that a return to the welfare state is now rendered impossible by globalization and ecological brinkmanship; state socialism is equally unacceptable, but something more just and viable is possible.

The D.C. Circuit is the training ground for the Supreme Court and the place where much of the nation’s regulatory framework is decided. In its current form, it is one the most dangerous courts in the land.

One of the most vibrant intellectual discussions in China this year, and one of the CCP’s cheapest propaganda campaigns, began with a tweet on Weibo, China’s premier micro-blogging service and anointed online town square.

In 2012 the Chinese government announced that for the first time in history, more people lived in its cities than in the countryside. It’s the result of an urbanization campaign that the country’s leadership has promoted, with spectacular results.

There is much to be learned from the lives and times of Ed Koch and David Dinkins, New York’s last two Democratic mayors. Their New York may not be as far away as it feels at the center of a thoroughly sanitized Times Square.