Big History has its charms. It aligns with Common Core, provides a wealth of material online for free, and is exciting. But it may be too big to be history at all.
William Deresiewicz not only critiques the idea that college education is about learning marketable skills; he also revives the quest for meaning, self, and soul.
Mailer, Trilling, Macdonald, Kazin, Maxwell, Bellow, Auden, O'Hara—men with public moral concerns, who seized power to shape American literature. But who were they?
Kevin Kruse convincingly claims that the association of patriotism with Christianity comes from a libertarian reaction in American business to the New Deal.
Tension between religious freedom and combating discrimination is the frame for RFRA debates. But these highlight a more basic problem with RFRA jurisprudence.
How can we choose to have agency over our lives when we are bombarded by choices? Crawford proposes a way to reclaim your attention span and thereby reclaim yourself
It’s Hillary Clinton, not Jeb Bush, who will take former President George H. W. Bush as her role model. Her road to victory was blazed by Jeb’s dad in 1988.
The political activist, public intellectual, and "father of modern linguistics" talks about Oscar Romero, Old Testament prophets, and the politics of fear.
With his concern for evidence and skepticism about the ability to transform complex systems, Daniel Patrick Moynihan is worth recalling in today's political climate.
The furor over Indiana's RFRA raises questions about our capacity to engage in the kind of thoughtful, careful public discussion that issues like this demand.
Highly skewed income distribution reduces social mobility. The locked-in advantages of children at the top of the income scale may already be irreversible.
Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder's correspondence narrates the tension between a place-based way of life and the travel schedule of a prominent writer, beautifully.
As mainstream news organizations were losing their claim on authority and trust, Jon Stewart used smarts and comedy to establish his own journalistic credibility.
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, at least 10 million fewer Americans are uninsured. The drop in the nation’s uninsured rate is the largest since the early 1970s.
Samet’s memoir has a bone to pick with American society and the Army itself—both, she believes, failed her former West Point cadets, soldiers who never returned.
If a president says anything critical about what Christians may have done at any point in history, he's destined to be attacked for engaging in “moral equivalence."
Paul Ryan’s "envy economics" label invites a description of his own approach, which would slash taxes on the rich and cut programs for the poor and middle class.
President Obama makes it clear that he thinks it’s more important to win a long-term argument with his ideological opponents than to pretend they'll work with him.
The charity of Americans does not meet the needs of America’s poor, yet the tax code reinforces reliance on giving to make up for an inadequate safety net.
A governor of modest achievements, Mario Cuomo nonetheless left a mark on the nation's broader political debates and offered a forceful rebuttal to Reaganism.
