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Simon Waxman has written for the Washington Post, the Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Boston Globe, Democracy Journal, and others. He is an editor at Harvard University Press and was previously managing editor of Boston Review. More can be found at waxmanwrites.wordpress.com.
Putin’s war in Ukraine breaks the rules, but powerful states always do. Far from dying, a just global order remains to be built.
Despite the myth that deaths of the elderly are never untimely, the author mourns a friend, fifty years his senior, who succumbed to COVID-19. She taught him that a moral life entails wanting those rewards not only for yourself but for everyone.
A Massachusetts high court ruling acknowledges that black men aren’t wrong for wanting to run from police.
Trump may have just been running off at the mouth, but policy experts agree he’s not entirely wrong about our dysfunctional relationship with NATO.
Donald Trump’s backers force the U.S. to confront its long-submerged id.
In Ferguson, white violence, exclusively, is justified.
The author of Walden was not an enemy of civic life.
Genetically engineered foods are safe, but there are still good reasons to label them.
The new HUD desegregation rule is a democratic reform, not a utopian one.
Opponents often associate racism with ignorance. But intelligent people promote oppression through colorblindness.
One of the many disturbing dimensions of Freddie Gray’s death after riding in a Baltimore Police van is how little the public knows about the circumstances.
Ever since the Indiana legislature passed its version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, lawmakers there have been on the defensive.
“Reports of the demise of Israeli-U.S. relations are not only premature, they’re just wrong.” It is hard to disagree.
The celebration of King’s official legacy as a cuddly figure of unity and tolerance serves to erase his politics from public memory.
To be a nuclear-armed state is to invest the executive with dictatorial powers over immeasurable destructive capacity.
The judicial process cannot account for what matters most: the policies and biases that enable white men to claim justification in the murder of black men.
Market Basket is as indispensable in working-class towns as it is in gentrifying and well-off neighborhoods.
The Supreme Court never agreed that access to contraceptives is a compelling government interest. The consequences may be significant.
The project of decontextualizing language.
The buffer zone decision is wonderfully logical but also divorced from real experience.
If gangsta rap lyrics are evidence of criminality, what are we to make of gruesome murders depicted in many folk and country songs?
Granting mercy is among humanity’s hardest tasks.
Should gun deaths be spoken about in the debate about gun control?
Managing Editor Simon Waxman interviews Jina Moore about how she reports and writes about poverty.
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