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 ...

The autobiography of anticolonial luminary Andrée Blouin captures her era’s euphoric highs as well as its tragic denouement.

Trump’s actions are illegal, yes. Worse than that, they are wrong—precisely what the legality debate is meant to obscure.

Nineteenth-century America was a place full of hazards. Disease, political oppression, imperialist warfare, poor living conditions, and hard manual labor took their toll, as they still do. But some ...

David Pozen is a law professor at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of The Constitution of the War on Drugs.

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, ...

The United States has never been “a nation of immigrants.” It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is, primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots, ...

Science is under fire as never before in the United States. Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump and his Republican allies dismiss the findings of health experts as casually as those of ...

Routinely, McDowell County, West Virginia, has been depicted as ground zero for “Trump Country.” One year ago, for instance, the Huffington Post used gritty black-and-white photographs of McDowell ...

This essay appears in print in Thinking in a Pandemic. Recent history tells us a lot about how epidemics unfold, how outbreaks spread, and how they are controlled. We also know a good deal about ...