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Philosophy & Religion

The Future of Political Philosophy

For five decades Anglophone political philosophy has been dominated by the liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls. With liberalism in crisis, have these ideas outlived their time?

Katrina Forrester

Race

What White Kids Learn About Race in School

Sixty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education, U.S. schools remain largely segregated. This matters not only because white and black students experience very different educational outcomes, but also because school is where children form many of their ideas about race and privilege.

War & Security

Holding Ourselves Responsible

In 2001, three frameworks for handling international crises emerged: the War on Terror, an ill-defined "responsibility to protect" struggling countries, and the Caribbean movement for reparations. The first two have failed, but the third may still have something to tell us.

Class & Inequality

Games Economists Play

The hostile reaction to Binyamin Appelbaum's new book reveals the tensions within the economics profession over some of its most self-serving myths.

Marshall Steinbaum

Science & Nature

Apocalypse Now

What Brazilian conservatives gain by letting the Amazon burn.

Gianpaolo Baiocchi

Science & Nature

The Why of the World

Allured by the promise of Big Data, science has shortchanged causal explanation in favor of data-driven prediction. But ultimately we must ask why.

Philosophy & Religion

The Gospel of Oil

Oil’s grip on U.S. society is as much religious as economic, a new history shows.

Kim Phillips-Fein

Arts in Society

The Country Without a Post Office

As news leaks of India’s forced communications blackout in Kashmir, the work of poet Agha Shahid Ali is tragically timely—both its depiction of Kashmiri suffering and the poet’s attempt to imagine a better future for his home.

Arts in Society

The Origins of Sexual Healing

Grammy winner David Ritz, who cowrote Marvin Gaye’s legendary “Sexual Healing,” recalls how the song emerged from Gaye’s struggles with faith, drug addiction, and childhood abuse.

Forum

How Race Made the Opioid Crisis

The success of OxyContin hinged on racially bifurcated understandings of addiction. The fundamental division between “dope” and medicine, after all, has always been the race and class of users.

Class & Inequality

Homes for Citizens

New York public housing is plagued with problems, but it possesses a democratic advantage that voucher systems lack: residents can hold the state accountable not only as tenants but as constituents.

Salonee Bhaman, Pedro A. Regalado

Class & Inequality

RIP Shareholder Primacy

For decades, the theory has obscured the basic standard that employees should do well when businesses do well. With cracks now in the foundation, however, new reforms could transform the inequalities at the heart of our economy.

Lenore Palladino

A Hidden Order of Reality

A World of Electric Children

Walt Whitman’s Boys

Jeremy Lybarger

Race in Black and White

Alexis L. Boylan

Looking for Solidarity

Sophie Maríñez

Writing the Twentieth Century

Announcing Boston Review’s new Arts in Society project

“More Queer Writing, Please”

Andrea Lawlor, Spencer Quong

Aretha Franklin’s Soul

Politics

Solid Trumpism

The Anti-Defamation League Is Not What It Seems

The Fragile Patriotism of the American Conservative

The Liberal Who Told Reagan’s Favorite Joke

Lawrence B. Glickman

Choosing Hope

Noam Chomsky, Scott Casleton

Finding the Future in Radical Rural America

Elizabeth Catte

“Every Crucifixion Needs a Witness”

Toussaint Losier, William J. Barber II

The Armed and Anxious White Psyche

Mark Tseng-Putterman

In Search of an Anti-Fascist Language

READING LISTS

Highway to Hell

READING LIST

A reading list for our time of climate crisis.

Essential Reads on White Supremacy

READING LIST

It's what our country was founded on—and it will take more than voting out Trump to dismantle it.

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