Uncertainty about where we find ourselves in political time—“back to the future,” back to the GOP of 1989, or back to Germany in the mid-1930s—goes beyond what any fact checking could resolve.

In Crito and Phaedo, Plato takes this alliance between Socrates and poetry further, attributing to Socrates direct acts of poetic composition in plays, hymns, and fables, conferring on him the title ...

Amid deficit-allergic neoliberal politics, everyone can agree on the appeal of budgetary savings. So now it is not just liberals going after mass incarceration. A group of brand-name conservatives, ...

Atop its other outrages and illegalities, the Trump administration has taken to murdering boatloads of presumptively innocent people on the open seas. They’ve done it three times now and promise to ...

I was still in college the first time someone cried in a parent-teacher conference with me. I had found a summer job at a free enrichment program for public school students. One of our students had ...

For much of the past decade, the most imitated new American poets were slippery, digressive, polyvocalic, creators of overlapping, colorful fragments. Their poems were avowedly personal, although they ...

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 ...

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, ...

Contrary to the Obama administration, U.S. health care spending isn’t high because Americans use too much medicine. The real culprit is our fragmented and privatized system. For more than a decade, ...

Sensing an opportunity, the Trump campaign amplified messages that linked Black Lives Matter (BLM) with looting and violence. In early September, in the aftermath of a BLM protest marred by ...

Terry Bouricius remembers the moment he converted to democracy by lottery. A bookish Vermonter, now sixty-eight, he was elected to the State House in 1990 after working for years as a public official ...