Miller warns that liberal hopes in such checks and balances are misplaced. Far from a safeguard of democracy, she argues, America’s constitutional order has always been at odds with it. Too many ...

Allen sought clarification. “That means that you will have to shoot half Spain?” To which Franco replied, “I repeat, at whatever cost.” ...

The failure of formal checks and balances to significantly stymie Trump is painfully clear. It is also not unprecedented. As Lisa Miller illustrates, checks and balances have been routinely weaponized ...

In June 1982, as employment in the U.S. auto industry continued to plummet, two white autoworkers, one of them recently laid off, started harassing a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin in a ...

Amy King is author of I Want to Make You Safe and co-editor of the PEN Poetry Series. Andrew Ridker, Cathy Park Hong, Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Robert Pinsky, Charles Bernstein, Harmony Holiday, ...

We live in an era of intersecting crises—some new, some old but newly visible. At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has already caused nearly 500,000 deaths in the United States alone, with ...

This essay is featured in our Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. Over the last year and a half, American universities have rapidly destroyed the right to protest on campus. At the request of ...

COVID-19 has exposed the fragility and inequity of the U.S. system of higher education. Decades of state disinvestment coupled with the rise of corporate management techniques has led to skyrocketing ...

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, ...