Along with creaky knees and extra pounds, many—myself included—carried a backpack of regrets about the way the road to hell ...

In the fall of 2018, University of California, Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez said, to an audience of economists, policymakers, and the press, “If the data don’t fit the theory, change the theory.” ...

In November 2021, then-Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, a Republican, signed into law new congressional maps that would, as before, give Democrats all nine of the state’s House seats—despite ...

It is almost axiomatic that authoritarian (or “would be” authoritarian) leaders are innately hostile to free and open universities. Consider, for instance, the obsessive preoccupation over much of the ...

Though this is not the way I would usually describe my career, one way of looking at it is that I spent my first 20 working years trying to raise money, and the next 15 trying to give it away. The ...

In early 2018, Larry Kramer, the dean of Stanford Law School and the president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which held assets of about $10 billion and disbursed around $400 million a ...

This article draws on some ideas developed further in Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World by Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce (New Press, November 2023). How could it be that ...

Stable, consolidated democracies are defined, in large part, by the durability of their formal institutions. Citizens, elected officials, and political parties engage in politics expecting democratic ...

Humankind is in a race between two tipping points. The first is when the Earth’s ecosystems and the life they contain tip into irreversible collapse due to climate change. The second is when the fight ...

Are democracy and capitalism compatible? Or, to put it differently: What made democracy and capitalism compatible for decades, even centuries, and what strains this relationship today? The end of the ...

Progressives are deeply skeptical of federalism, and with good reason. States’ rights have been invoked to defend some of the most despicable institutions in American history, most notably slavery and ...

In the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections, President Biden attempted to frame our nation’s central political conflict as a battle between democracy and MAGA-style authoritarianism. “Donald Trump ...