This essay appears in our Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. On Saturday night, a lone gunman attacked the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, sending off the predictable wave of ...

On the ground in Gaza there is no trace of any effort to rebuild, nor have humanitarian conditions improved. This is what ...

The United States has never been “a nation of immigrants.” It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is, primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots, ...

When the emails started coming in, I ignored them. By day’s end, my voicemail and email inboxes were filling up with links to the Guardian, followed by links to Facebook pages and blogposts devoted to ...

U.S. history is a strange, exceptional field of play where, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s famous sign-off from Lake Wobegon, all the revolutions are strong, all the revolutionaries are kind, and ...

During her long and contentious life that spanned much of the twentieth century, Pauli Murray (1910–1985) involved herself in nearly every progressive cause she could find. Yet the contributions of ...

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Alabama governor George Wallace’s most famous sentence fired through the frigid air on the coldest day anyone in the state could remember.

Gender is queer. By which I mean irredeemably strange, ungraspable, out of sync with “male” and “female,” weirdly not normal, since lived gender fails to conform to normative ideals and expectations, ...

In Chu T’ien-wen’s 1994 novel Notes of a Desolate Man, the narrator recalls the death a decade earlier of French philosopher Michel Foucault: The unfinished history of sexual consciousness stopped ...

In the late 1940s, the Cold War was heating up. In the United States anticommunism had reached a fever pitch at the same time that antiblack violence had forcefully re-emerged in the form of lynching ...