How Americans lost faith in the possibility of self-government

“Our America” presents a mournful, terrible, exhilarating, and honest tour of the United States.

The next few weeks will be a constant reminder that the biggest tournament in the sports world should never have been awarded to Qatar.

A new book exalts the heyday of music magazines, when electric prose reigned and egos collided.

In Ryan Lee Wong’s novel, a young activist gets caught up in his own idealism.

Nikyatu Jusu’s portrait of a nanny’s breakdown fuses horror and social realism.

A new work of history finds the best antidote to today’s authoritarian politics in Daniel Webster’s nineteenth-century civic nationalism.

Back for a fifth season, “Yellowstone” glorifies a rural rancher’s war against outsiders and developers.

Lucy Sante’s new book uncovers the story of New York’s pursuit of water, and the homes and communities destroyed in the process.

The passions of Pennsylvania were on full display in the last week of the campaign in the battleground state. Photographer Mark Peterson was there to capture the action.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant make the case for health care revolution.

Timothy Shenk studies how political leaders build popular majorities. He warns that the next big realignment could be led by the right.

While the anti-monopoly movement has a huge victory to celebrate, the publishing industry is left with a sense of impending doom.

Charles Leerhsen’s biography promises the unfiltered story of Bourdain’s life and final days. But it misses the qualities that made him so magnetic in the first place.

In the quaint, well-to-do worlds of her novels, anyone could be guilty. Murderers kill to beat the social order at its own game.

China in the 1980s contemplated a more liberal future—then wrote those debates out of its history.

The author of “City of Quartz” and “Ecology of Fear” changed the way we think about cities, inequality, and climate change.

Gurnah’s haunting novels of war and oppression, which won him the Nobel Prize in literature last year, defy the dominant trends in American publishing.

Longtermists focus on ensuring humanity’s existence into the far future. But not without sacrifices in the present.

At its peak in the eighteenth century, Jena in Germany may have had a higher concentration of geniuses than Renaissance Florence or ancient Athens—and plenty of drama.