Democracy

What Are We Living Through?

Three competing narratives of the second Trump administration.

  • Jedediah Britton-Purdy
  • David Pozen

A General Air of Anxiety

The Red Scare targeted my father. He taught me the meaning of resistance.

  • Joan Wallach Scott

Democracy v. the Constitution

An interview with Osita Nwanevu about his new book, The Right of the People, and why defeating authoritarianism requires going back to democratic basics.

  • Osita Nwanevu
  • Jake Grumbach

Could Ditching Elections Save Democracy?

A new book makes the case for replacing them with a system of government based on random selection.

  • Niko Kolodny

How Did We Fare on COVID-19?

To restore public trust and prepare for the next pandemic, we need a reckoning with the U.S. experience—what worked, and what didn’t.

  • Stephen Macedo
  • Frances Lee
with responses from
  • Adam Gaffney
  • Jonathan White
  • Cailin O’Connor & James Owen Weatherall
  • Adam Kucharski

The Real Path to Abundance

To deliver plentiful housing and clean energy, we have to get the story right about what’s standing in the way.

  • Sandeep Vaheesan

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The Dead End of Checks and Balances

Far from the cure to Trumpian authoritarianism, the U.S. constitutional system is driving our democratic decline.

  • Lisa L. Miller
with responses from
  • Eric Blanc
  • Marcus Gadson
  • Gianpaolo Baiocchi
  • Samuel Moyn
  • Aziz Z. Huq
  • Kelly Hayes & Maya Schenwar
  • Lily Geismer

Mexico’s Disappeared

Forty-three students became democracy’s martyrs. What about the other 110,000 missing?

  • Claudio Lomnitz

How to Buy an Election

The problem is no longer “money in politics.” It’s just money.

  • Mark Schmitt

Politics All the Way Down

Critics are right: the algorithms that increasingly run the world can be dangerous. Are human systems always better?

  • Lily Hu

The AI We Deserve

Critiques of artificial intelligence abound. Where’s the utopian vision for what it could be?

  • Evgeny Morozov
with responses from
  • Brian Eno
  • Audrey Tang
  • Terry Winograd
  • Bruce Schneier & Nathan Sanders
  • Sarah Myers West & Amba Kak
  • Wendy Liu
  • Edward Ongweso Jr.
  • Brian Merchant

Cultivating Meaning

Evgeny Morozov responds.

  • Evgeny Morozov

Learning from the Luddites

The key to an alternative is building a movement.

  • Brian Merchant

The Plot Against Finance

Any public agenda will have to take on Wall Street.

  • Edward Ongweso Jr.

Whose Values?

Boosters peddle the illusion of objectivity to avoid messy politics.

  • Wendy Liu

AI’s Missing Others

Those excluded from Silicon Valley point the way forward.

  • Sarah Myers West
  • Amba Kak

Trust Issues

The closed corporate ecosystem is the problem.

  • Bruce Schneier
  • Nathan Sanders

Machines of Caring Grace

The goal should be to support humans, not to replace them.

  • Terry Winograd

The Real Legacy of Cybernetics

Lessons from the personal computing revolution.

  • Audrey Tang

AI’s Walking Dog

Today’s tech inverts the value of the creative process.

  • Brian Eno

What AI Can’t Do for Democracy

Its potential to enhance civic engagement crucially depends on what policymakers want to learn from the public.

  • Daniel Berliner

The Violent Exhaustion of Liberal Democracy

A conversation with Wendy Brown on the U.S. presidential election, the exclusions liberal democracy is built on, and why we must aim at more than restoring its mythical former splendor.

  • Wendy Brown
  • Francis Wade

Forget Fusion, Look to Alaska!

Open primaries and ranked choice are better paths forward.

  • Danielle Allen

The Real Engine of Change

There’s no substitute for rebuilding a vibrant civil society.

  • Deepak Bhargava
  • Arianna Jiménez
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