Miller warns that liberal hopes in such checks and balances are misplaced. Far from a safeguard of democracy, she argues, ...

The failure of formal checks and balances to significantly stymie Trump is painfully clear. It is also not unprecedented. As Lisa Miller illustrates, checks and balances have been routinely weaponized ...

As we struggle to answer his policies with progressive alternatives, the history of popular economic nationalism and its often-racist politics offers a powerful warning. The answer, though, isn’t a ...

This essay appears in our Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. In August 1936, after a failed coup against the Second Spanish Republic, Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces seized the city of ...

Amy King is author of I Want to Make You Safe and co-editor of the PEN Poetry Series. Andrew Ridker, Cathy Park Hong, Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Robert Pinsky, Charles Bernstein, Harmony Holiday, ...

We live in an era of intersecting crises—some new, some old but newly visible. At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has already caused nearly 500,000 deaths in the United States alone, with ...

COVID-19 has exposed the fragility and inequity of the U.S. system of higher education. Decades of state disinvestment coupled with the rise of corporate management techniques has led to skyrocketing ...

This essay is featured in our Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. Over the last year and a half, American universities have rapidly destroyed the right to protest on campus. At the request of ...

Beginning in the late 1860s, the decade that it took to construct the Suez Canal, photographs depicting its feats of engineering circulated across the world. Sold to travelers as souvenirs, featured ...

Instead of pouring public funds into private industry—as the United States did with COVID-19 vaccines—we must build public capacity and prioritize public objectives. COVID-19 vaccines were both a ...