Ideas

Economics

How Tech Rules

The AI boom is only the latest stage in Silicon Valley’s long history of creating and expanding intellectual monopolies.

October 22, 2026 issue

Piper French

Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay

Joe Kloc’s portrait of a group of outsiders living on boats in Marin County provides a record of a community many wish would quietly disappear.

September 24, 2026 issue

Michael Gorra

Call My Agent

With their blend of taste and market savvy, literary agents have been both invisible and necessary in contemporary American fiction.

June 25, 2026 issue

David W. Blight

Dreams of Our Nation

Historians must not cede the study of how Americans understand their cacophonous nation to advocates of “patriotic” history.

June 11, 2026 issue

Quinn Slobodian

Damming the Big Ocean

Edward Fishman’s Chokepoints explains how the US came to rely on its economic arsenal, but stops short of a complete assessment of the unreliable tactic and its often devastating consequences.

June 11, 2026 issue

Trevor Jackson

The Aging Class

Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.

April 23, 2026 issue

Caroline Fraser

The Throwaway Planet

Three books raise political and moral questions about human consumption—and the value we place on those who clean up the waste.

April 23, 2026 issue

Yi-Ling Liu

Shenzhen Express

In Shenzhen, the successes and failures of China’s remarkable new economy are on full display.

April 9, 2026 issue

Too Damn High

Charlie Dulik

The Long Fight for Tenant Power

Organized tenants in the US have long debated how to meet the scale of the crises they face. Under Trump, that question is more pressing than ever.

July 22, 2025

Piper French

A Housing Crisis in Paradise

Two residential developments in Marin County have, for different reasons, met with resistance from their communities. What can they tell us about the way out of California’s housing emergency?

April 26, 2023

Caroline Fraser

No Haven

In ‘This Is All I Got,’ a report about a year in the life of a homeless single mother in New York City, Lauren Sandler finds the intractable source of homelessness in the piratical inequities of the housing market.

October 22, 2020 issue

Gabriel M. Schivone

America’s Eviction Epidemic

Across the country, millions of people are facing eviction as protections in place for the pandemic have lapsed.

September 16, 2020

E. Tammy Kim

Moms 4 Housing & the Right to a Home

In Oakland, a coordinated, grassroots response to the housing emergency is revealing new potential for inspiring change.

March 9, 2020

A postcard showing the St. Denis Hotel at Broadway and 11th Street, New York City, circa 1908

Jeremiah Moss

The Death and Life of a Great American Building

As affordable rents disappear, the mental health of New Yorkers increasingly becomes yet another tale of two cities. Imagine a future Manhattan without shrinks. What will happen to the psyche of that city?

March 7, 2018

Tara Raghuveer

How New York’s Tenants Won

To understand how Zohran Mamdani swept New York’s mayoral primary, it helps to know why the city’s tenants went on the offensive against real estate.

July 22, 2025

Alissa Quart

Anti-Rent Wars, Then and Now

Amid the 1840s economic crisis, landlords tried to drive out tenants in default. The remarkable movement that rose to challenge evictions can be a model for today’s housing activists.

October 25, 2021

The Latest

Caroline Fraser

Boxcar to Nowhere

American lore about hoboes has sugared over the economic and environmental forces that drove people from their homes and onto the rails and roads in the first place, as a new history lays out.

October 22, 2026 issue

Catherine Nicholson

Pox Britannica

In eighteenth-century London, syphilis was “the secret disease” that lived in plain sight, and its diagnosis helped modernize the medical profession.

October 22, 2026 issue

a conversation with Osita Nwanevu and Suzanne Schneider

The Neocons’ Revenge?

Trump’s war has deepened the already-widening cracks in the MAGA coalition.

March 25, 2026

David A. Bell

Who Built France?

A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.

April 9, 2026 issue

Jacob Weisberg

Tick, Tick…Boom!

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s history of the 1929 stock market crash reminds us that financial bubbles are inevitable—and that another one may be about to pop.

March 26, 2026 issue

Robert G. Kaiser

Post Mortem

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t.

March 26, 2026 issue

Sandeep Vaheesan

Building the Electrostate

The long story of public power suggests that state ownership can in fact appeal to the broad American public.

February 26, 2026

Trevor Jackson

The Struggle for the Fed

The Fed is under attack. Can it be both protected and held accountable?

February 26, 2026 issue

Julian Gewirtz

When the Chips Are Down

President Trump’s reversal of a ban on sales of advanced semiconductors to China undercut the strategic logic behind years of American policy that was meant to keep the US ahead in the race to develop AI systems.

February 26, 2026 issue