When Public Goes Private, as Trump Wants: What Happens?

Diane Ravitch on the future of charter schools and public schools under President-Elect Trump.

Published: Nov 18, 2016
Length: 19 minutes (4,752 words)

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.

Published: Nov 10, 2016
Length: 10 minutes (2,554 words)

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.

Published: Aug 15, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,566 words)

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.

Published: Aug 18, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,557 words)

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.

Published: Jul 14, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,580 words)

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.”

Published: Jun 23, 2016
Length: 16 minutes (4,098 words)

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.

Published: May 20, 2016
Length: 11 minutes (2,955 words)

California Notes

Didion’s thoughts about California from when she covered the Patty Hearst trial in 1976.

Published: May 4, 2016
Length: 9 minutes (2,491 words)

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.

Author: Teffi
Published: May 3, 2016
Length: 42 minutes (10,692 words)

To Consider Myself a Human Being

How China remembers the Cultural Revolution.

Author: Ji Xianlin
Published: Mar 3, 2016
Length: 26 minutes (6,690 words)