Sales in the railway reserve flooded the market with cheap land sold off to speculators who retained title for decades before ...

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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, ...

Political judgment takes place within political time. And political time is less a matter of chronology than of genre. What kind of moment are we living through? Is our system of government undergoing ...

Pundits and politicians conceal the truth: it’s all around us, perpetrated by our political system itself. Georges Sorel, writing in 1908, gave a very different account of violence in his classic, ...

A version of this essay appears in our Summer 2025 issue under the headline “The Mamdani Model.” Become a member to get a copy. While masked, heavily armed, unidentified men are grabbing people off ...

This past April, the FBI made an admission that was nothing short of catastrophic for the field of forensic science. In an unprecedented display of repentance, the Bureau announced that, for years, ...

Rare is the CEO today who, in the face of public concern about a potentially dangerous product, says, “Let’s hire the best scientists to figure out if the problem is real and then, if it is, stop ...

Events of the past decade have prompted frenzied discussion of the state of democracy across the globe. In countries across Europe, Latin America, and Asia—as well as, of course, in the United ...

A future historian of the cognitive sciences—that recently formed amalgam of disciplines which probes the operations of the human mind—might select any of a number of episodes as marking the birth of ...