“The Most Beloved Man on the Planet”: Ken Burns on Muhammad Ali

Ken Burns, the celebrated documentarian whose films have chronicled America’s story from jazz to baseball to war, is out with his and his team’s newest work, a four-part documentary about the life of Muhammad Ali. The film, called simply Muhammad Ali and produced by Burns, daughter Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, tells Ali’s full life story, from his...

2h

Vaccinating the Unvaccinated Is Better Than Giving People Covid Booster Shots

Nearly a year ago, the results from the Covid-19 vaccine trials were like a dream come true for health experts: The trials were huge and designed well, and the results were clear and persuasive. The vaccines were extremely safe and even more effective than expected. Only weeks after the data came in, the first health workers were rolling up their sleeves...

2h

Who’s Afraid of Judy Chicago?

“A great deal of hokey art has been made in the service of excellent causes.” Thus begins Robert Hughes’s pan of the feminist artist Judy Chicago in a December 1980 issue of Time. He was reviewing her massive installation, The Dinner Party. The work is a triangular dinner table set with 39 places; each of the embroidered place settings names a different...

4h

Occupy Wall Street at 10: What It Taught Us, and Why It Mattered

Ten years ago today, on September 17, 2011, a small band of anarchists, artists, and anti-poverty organizers convened themselves in Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, steps from the New York Stock Exchange. They were there to challenge the power of Wall Street and also to try something new in the annals of modern American protest movements: to be...

4h

Why Did Senate Democrats Strip Ethics Reform From Their Voting Rights Bill?

The scope and ambition of any Democratic voting rights bill are, at this point, academic: As long as the filibuster is in place, almost any effort to protect the right to vote from authoritarian-minded Republicans is doomed to die in the Senate. Both measures that have already passed the House of Representatives have met that fate.  But hope springs...

4h

There May Be No Realistic Way to Fix Gerrymandering

There is no shortage of areas where American democracy is in desperate need of reform. Most debates on this subject surround the parts of government where voters’ influence is weakest: the geographically unbalanced Senate and its filibuster, the presidency and its haphazard Electoral College, the Supreme Court and its corrosive confirmation process....

4h

How Does Don Jr. Roll?

This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project.It was February 2016, and the pivotal South Carolina Republican presidential primary was just days away when Donald Trump made a campaign stop at Fratello’s Italian Tavern in the city of North Charleston to have lunch with longtime Mayor Keith...

4h

Richard Powers’s Bewilderment Is an Exercise in Empathy

The novelist Richard Powers has made a name for himself as a gloriously geeky writer, unafraid of big ideas. Over 12 novels, he has tackled race, religion, identity, politics, music, technology, surveillance, genetics, the environment, and more, often in startling ways. In The Gold Bug Variations, he interwove Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” the four...

4h

Direct Democracy Is Breaking California

The foolishness of California’s recall system—which failed this week to replace California Governor Gavin Newsom with a right-wing talk radio blowhard—is not a new story. It ought to have been made evident by the California election in 1910 that led to its creation. The Progressive Republican candidate for governor that year, a San Francisco prosecutor...

18h

75 Percent of Young People Are Frightened by the Future. That’s the Only Sane Reaction to Climate Change.

The climate crisis is also a mental health crisis. Psychologists have known this for some time. But this week, preliminary findings from a massive new study have revealed that global warming’s impact on young people’s well-being is far more intense than anyone predicted. The worst part is that the kids’ distress isn’t irrational: The problem...

21h