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But putting forward a theory of progress is not only a way of settling a theoretical dispute; it’s also a move with real stakes. As confidence in collective life wanes, progress can seem not merely ...

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, ...

One 2012 Obama for America training deck that seems ancient now describes staging locations as “temporary field offices for a campaign—either at a home, business, or public space” that are “used to ...

When Andrea Dworkin died of heart disease in 2005, at age fifty-eight, U.S. feminism lost its most inflammatory voice. Between Woman Hating (1974), her transcultural examination of women in history ...

U.S. history is a strange, exceptional field of play where, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s famous sign-off from Lake Wobegon, all the revolutions are strong, all the revolutionaries are kind, and ...

In their new book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that American liberals have ironically succumbed to a conservative worldview, in the original sense of “conservative.” Instead of ...

When James Baldwin visited San Francisco in 1963 to film a documentary about U.S. racism, he encountered neighborhoods in turmoil: the city was seizing properties through eminent domain, razing them, ...

On the eve of the November 1938 midterm elections, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a forceful radio address. “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and ...

Earlier this year Gallup published some incredible statistics, showing that Gen Z is our queerest generation yet, with nearly 20 percent identifying somewhere under the broad LGBTQIA+ umbrella. (Some ...

“Would the world be a better, or even a different, place if the public understood more of the scope and the limitations, the findings and the methods of science?” This question was taken up in 1985 by ...