When Public Goes Private, as Trump Wants: What Happens?
Diane Ravitch on the future of charter schools and public schools under President-Elect Trump.
Autocracy: Rules for Survival
Russian emigree Masha Gessen, author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, offers sobering pointers on how to survive under—and stand in uncompromising resistance to—the rule of a totalitarian autocrat.
The Genius of James Brown
As big a musical figure as James Brown is, it’s hard for some of us to appreciate how much Brown defined the 1960s while avoiding being contained by them. A non-traditional book eschews standard biography in order to make sense of the complex, contradictory, lingering genius of the Godfather of Soul ─ Mr. Dynamite himself ─ without expecting all the answers.
Fences: A Brexit Diary
“When everyone’s building a fence, isn’t it a true fool who lives out in the open?” Zadie Smith reflects on post-Brexit Britain.
A Stark Nuclear Warning
Ours is an era of anxiety: fear of terrorism, fear of climate change, fear of gun violence and police shootings and mass shootings and the current high stakes presidential election. Add to that the extreme risk even a small scale nuclear attack poses to our society, and the historical paranoia, politics and economics that got us here.
In the Depths of the Digital Age
“Virginia Woolf’s serious joke that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” was a hundred years premature. Human character changed on or about December 2010, when everyone, it seemed, started carrying a smartphone.”
The Bittersweet Victories of Women
The mystery of how sex was added to the list of characteristics to be protected from employment discrimination in the Civil Rights Act — and how the legal struggle to fight gender discrimination evolved in the years that followed.
California Notes
Didion’s thoughts about California from when she covered the Patty Hearst trial in 1976.
My Dinner With Rasputin
Writing in 1924, Teffi, a Russian writer in exile known for her wit, recalls a series of humorous (but increasingly ominous) encounters with the trusted friend of the last Tsar of Russia.
To Consider Myself a Human Being
How China remembers the Cultural Revolution.