Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s Netflix documentary Cover-Up follows the life and work of legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Cover-Up depicts the kind of maverick journalism we desperately need in our authoritarian times.
Congress is now attempting to end the Iran war without President Donald Trump’s approval. The House of Representatives is invoking the War Powers Resolution, potentially setting the stage for a legal showdown over the limits of executive power.
Amazon was already gargantuan before the pandemic. Its rapid growth since then has made it one of the most powerful institutions in the country’s history — shaping our physical as much as mental landscapes, and putting more and more of our daily lives under its control.
More than three decades since dictator Alfredo Stroessner was forced from office, his Partido Colorado still runs Paraguay. Its leader Horacio Cartes fuses mafia and political power — and is stepping up his authoritarian control.
Brazil's massive corruption scandals have turned the country's politics into a spectator sport.
The big story of this month’s UK election was a Conservative meltdown, while support for Labour barely rose at all. Along with disastrous missteps by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, long-term structural factors mean the Tories are in decline.
In The Bill of Obligations, Council on Foreign Relations president and MSNBC stalwart Richard Haass offers solutions to America’s democratic crisis. The book, littered with vacuous bromides, is proof that liberals are all out of ideas.
A bombshell new report reveals just how extensively Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has allowed billionaire interests to buy him favors. But he’s far from the only one on the powerful court that’s happy to be showered in favors from the ultrarich.
Die Linke's position on Palestine has isolated it from the global solidarity movement.
A new translation of Homer’s Iliad attempts to combine the lyricism of the original Greek with direct and modern language. With a few exceptions, it hits both notes perfectly, making the epic poem feel dramatic and fresh.
Louis Menand’s new history of Cold War art and thought The Free World wants to rehabilitate liberal anti-communism. To do so, it downplays both the political repression of the US left and imperial America’s genocide against its Third World political opponents.
The November Revolution of 1918 replaced Germany’s monarchist regime with a parliamentary system. But its Social Democratic leaders made a pact with the old ruling class to repress the left-wing radicals who wanted to go further, crippling the new Weimar Republic from the start.
The 1964 film Seven Up! asked 14 British seven-year-olds about their hopes of being the “shop steward and the executive of the year 2000.” Revisiting them every seven years for more than half a century, director Michael Apted made his interviewees into familiar faces — and shone a light on changing notions of class in Britain.
Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fabelmans is a dull, self-indulgent victory lap for the most victorious filmmaker in history.
As British political life exhibits ever more morbid symptoms, the reissue of Elizabeth Taylor’s 1971 novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is well-timed. Its sharply observed and amusing portrait of England’s post-imperial decline speaks to us across the decades.
The destruction of California’s once vast and magnificent redwood forests is entwined with American expansion westward, violent dispossession, and the ravenous commodification of nature. The remaining redwoods demand our protection.
The past week saw Democrats take up Trump’s hard-right immigration policy as their own for campaign fodder, with the liberal press’s assent. The very xenophobia that Democrats decried as “fascism” has become their policy agenda.
When Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington, the spirit of socialism showed up in everything from snowplows to poetry. Writer Dan Chiasson tells the story of these years from the unique vantage point of his own experience growing up in Bernie’s Burlington.
Writer-director Jordan Peele’s mysterious third film, Nope, draws on genre tropes from both alien invasion films and Westerns, but it ends up with something altogether original: a Hollywood spectacle about spectacle.
Period dramas too often treat their subject with polite reverence and slavish accuracy. Tony McNamara’s new show, The Great, flips the genre on its head, telling the story of Russia’s great Empress with all the grotesque comedy the eighteenth-century Russian court deserves.