Historian Stuart Schrader on the untold history of police unions—and how they helped catapult cops to new heights of power and impunity.

I would like to stage a fight between two different accounts of the current political landscape—what’s been called the “post-truth” era, the infodemic, the end of democracy, or perhaps most accurately ...

As even its harshest critics concede, neoliberalism is hard to pin down. In broad terms, it denotes a preference for markets over government, economic incentives over social or cultural norms, and ...

Do laws criminalizing prostitution violate the Constitution? Probably. Until recently, such a proposition would have been as absurd as suggesting, in 1972, that the Constitution guaranteed a right to ...

Like U.S. history, classical music has become a new front in the culture wars as musicians and music institutions grapple with the legacies of racism. With most performing arts organizations shuttered ...

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, ...

Political judgment takes place within political time. And political time is less a matter of chronology than of genre. What kind of moment are we living through? Is our system of government undergoing ...

In the late 1940s, the Cold War was heating up. In the United States anticommunism had reached a fever pitch at the same time that antiblack violence had forcefully re-emerged in the form of lynching ...

Over a decade ago, California put a price on carbon pollution. At first glance the policy appears to be a success: since it began in 2013, emissions have declined by more than 8 percent. Today the ...

The Italian novelist Italo Calvino was unusually optimistic about the invention of a “literature machine.” In his 1967 essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” he imagines a computer that would be “capable of ...