Ideas

Economics

Kenneth Pomeranz

The Puzzle of the Qing

Why did China’s Qing rulers keep land taxes at levels too low to meet the state’s needs for so long?

June 26, 2025 issue

Ben Tarnoff

The Labor Theory of AI

Artificial intelligence may be the first attempt to automate and discipline human labor that even its creators don’t fully comprehend.

March 27, 2025 issue

Nic Johnson

Breaking the Conveyor Belt

Motivated perhaps above all by culture-war grievance, in the past month Donald Trump has tried to radically reshape a century-old system of global trade.

April 20, 2025

Diane Ravitch

Selling Out Our Public Schools

For decades, the term “school choice”—and the programs it signifies, which divert public money to private schools—was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. Now it’s the law in thirty-three states.

March 13, 2025 issue

Fara Dabhoiwala

Charting an Unheroic Past

With her densely textured, ambitious, and deeply collaborative scholarship, the historian Catherine Hall has transformed public discourse about slavery.

April 24, 2025 issue

Caitlin Zaloom

Too Close for Comfort

Why are economists in the US today uniquely able to exercise such sway over the state?

February 13, 2025 issue

Quinn Slobodian

Speed Up the Breakdown

The future of the government depends on how far the DOGE dynamo spins.

February 15, 2025

Vanessa Ogle

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Gold is both a vehicle for disguising illicit financial flows and a product of illicit activity itself.

February 1, 2025

On Public Health

Mark Honigsbaum

The Deep Roots of Vaccine Hesitancy

Understanding the battle over immunization—from the pre-Victorian era onward—between public health and the people may help in treating anti-vax sentiment.

December 14, 2021

Gavin Francis

Resistance to Immunity

Opposition to vaccines has been around for as long as vaccines themselves. What can be done to convince the public that infectious disease is not a private concern?

May 23, 2019 issue

Helen Epstein

The Strange Politics of Saving the Children

A small number of simple medical supplies, including vaccines for measles, diphtheria, tetanus, and polio as well as oral rehydration solution could prevent about half of child deaths in the developing world, if only the international community would pay for them.

November 5, 2015 issue

M.F. Perutz

Department of Defense

New ways of killing people have always been adopted with alacrity, but ways of preventing illness have sometimes taken centuries to be implemented.

October 8, 1987 issue

The Latest

Daniel J. Kevles

Farmer George

Bruce Ragsdale’s Washington at the Plow examines the connections between the first president’s commitment to agricultural innovation and his evolving attitudes toward his enslaved laborers at Mount Vernon.

February 13, 2025 issue

Trevor Jackson

‘Never Too Much’

If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?

January 16, 2025 issue

C.L.R. James, interviewed by Stuart Hall, introduction by Phoebe Braithwaite

A Microcosm of the World

The complete, unaired 1976 BBC interview

December 21, 2024

Robert Kuttner

The Import of Exports

Free trade once aligned with America’s economic and security interests, but in recent years experts have suggested pulling back from globalism and rebuilding the domestic economy.

December 19, 2024 issue

Adam Gaffney, David U. Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler

The Only Way to Fix US Health Care

The evidence confirms what our patients regard as common sense: copays and deductibles cause people to skip needed care and hence suffer poorer health, and even mortal consequences.

November 7, 2024 issue

Matthew Desmond

A Prophet for the Poor

In order to build a mass movement for economic justice, Reverend William Barber argues, we need to let go of the idea that poverty is an exclusively Black or urban issue.

October 3, 2024 issue

Ben Tarnoff

Venture-Backed Trumpism

Why have right-wing ideas found such an eager audience among tech elites during Biden’s presidency?

September 19, 2024 issue

Jenny Uglow

Worms’ Work

For five thousand years there has been no shortage of uses for silk, from Genghis Khan’s undershirts to nerve repair.

September 19, 2024 issue

Lynn Hunt

In Search of Steady Reform

Fareed Zakaria seeks lessons for the present in various European revolutions, but the “liberal” English and Dutch examples he singles out as exemplary barely qualify as revolutionary at all.

September 19, 2024 issue