The United States stands out among Western democracies for its extreme partisan political polarization. It has reached the level of “pernicious polarization,” by which I mean a division of society ...

When we think about economic growth, we generally think about inventions and technology—from the combustion engine to the iPhone—and about the effects of capital accumulation, like big dams or ...

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 ...

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 ...

Dark Money: The Hidden History of The Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer • Doubleday • 2016 • 449 pages • $29.95 Ida Tarbell’s extraordinary 1904 book, The History of 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 ...

The political story of the 2020s is half-written—two wildly unorthodox Trump Administrations bookending a single Biden term, all three breaking in significant ways from the bipartisan economic ...

Storytelling is the essence of politics. In stable times, politicians can spend their hours detailing how they plan to put a fatter chicken in every pot. But in hard times, they need to craft ...

We’re learning a lot about how government can shape our lives by watching the second Trump Administration dismantle it. One lesson is that government’s capacity to do good runs on information no less ...

“The denial or observance of [the right to bargain collectively] means the difference between despotism and democracy.” Senator Robert F. Wagner, speaking after the Supreme Court upheld the National ...

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) may be the most powerful source of state capacity across the 50 states, employing over 1,400 people and overseeing the electricity, natural gas, water ...

In 1971, a few weeks after The New York Times wrapped its explosive series on the Pentagon Papers, the conservative magazine National Review ran a scoop of its own: another set of secret papers, this ...