Opinion Justice Ginsburg’s Cautious Radicalism Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times ONE day last May, while receiving an award, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supre

Last week, we looked at one zombie Social Security lie that keeps coming back from the dead every time the Very Serious People begin to talk in Very Serious Tones about the problems of the system: the

Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images A few weeks ago, the liberal comedian Bill Maher and conservative strategist and pundit Bill Kristol had a brief spat on Maher’s HBO show, putatively over what inst

The main sticking point in negotiations between Republicans and Democrats on deficit reduction measures to accompany a rise in the debt limit is whether higher revenues should make any contribution. A

Editor’s note: On February 1, 2023, the College Board announced its finalized curriculum for an AP African American Studies course. It has removed work—present in the pilot program—by writers such as

Credit...Photo illustration by Neil Kellerhouse. Source photograph: Associated Press. Feature What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death? The history of Obama’s most important foreign-policy

There have been rumors for years that the NSA can decrypt a significant fraction of encrypted Internet traffic. In 2012, James Bamford published an article quoting anonymous former NSA officials stati

Here is the story of The Day Jacques Pépin Saved My Life. That’s how I tell it, anyway —at parties, over dinner, on those occasions when a friend finds himself drowning in his own life and I’m cast as

When Raúl Labrador looks at his fellow House Republicans, he sees a lot of people who are in Washington for the wrong reasons. “They think that being a member of Congress is just so dang cool, and tha

The Republican civil war has claimed its biggest casualty yet. The revolution that toppled John Boehner was carried out by a group of intransigent conservatives who had made the speaker of the House’s

Getty By Mike Allen and Alex Isenstadt 09/23/2015 05:32 AM EDT Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker pulled the plug on a bloated campaign that was headed into debt and was being undermined by furious donors, a

Hey, ya made it, great to see ya!” says Donald Trump, having just stepped aboard his throne room of a plane and stopping by my seat to extend his hand. “You get the big tour yet? No? What the hell? C’

At first he didn't look suspicious, not to me anyway. A tall guy in his late 20s, sandy brown hair, glasses, wearing khakis and a blue striped button-down shirt. Just another downtown office worker, l

At the northern tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula lies the quaint town of Petoskey, population 6,080. In late March, a thick white shelf of ice still covers Lake Michigan, and a few miles north, over

Over the past decade, the foreign-policy debate in Washington has turned upside down. As George W. Bush’s administration drew to an end, the brand of ambitious, expensive, Manichaean, militaristic for

By Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Nathan Furr The first thing you notice when you step onto Tesla Motors' production floor are the robots. Eight-foot-tall bright-red bots that look like Transforme

For decades after its discovery in 1930, Pluto looked like nothing more than a gray smudge in the abyss of space. We knew it was there—even knew its size and gravity—but, without better images, we cou

noted

When Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago following the unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man named Freddie Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race

Let us discuss the very nature of the cosmos. What you may find in this discussion is not what you expect. Going into a conversation about the universe as a whole, you would imagine a story full of wo

Software has been around since the 1940s. Which means that people have been faking their way through meetings about software, and the code that builds it, for generations. Now that software lives in o

Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Chang W. Lee/The New York Times/Redux Jonah Peretti (left), cofounder and chief executive of BuzzFeed, with Ben Smith (center), its edi

Best year of superhero TV ever? Best year of superhero TV ever. While not every show was perfect, there was a plethora of excellent comic TV series this past season, and they’ve provided four clear lessons for the future. So, next season’s show? Listen up. Warning: May include spoilers for the most…

In 2000, as Martin O’Malley took over as mayor of Baltimore and promised to bring crime under control, there was worry on the part of some in the city that the zero-policing, broken-windows strategies

The final episode of Mad Men is perhaps the greatest finale in the history of television, a last episode that works on a character level - we see all these characters we love coming to a places of hap

Worth the trouble? Photo by Carin Baer/AMC As both a professor at Harvard Business School and a Mad Men obsessive, I’ve been considering the final episodes of the series from what is surely an unusual

Intolerance. And a broken-windows policy of policing is exactly what it means: The property matters. The people can stay broken until hell freezes over. And the ejection of these ill-bought philosophi

Ninety-five years ago, a horrific train wreck wiped a Brooklyn street off the map, and changed the city’s subway system forever. Story by James Folta · Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons · 3.20.13 Story

Bob Iger wanted approval. It was February 2011, and the Walt Disney Co. CEO gathered his board of directors inside an intimate theater at the company’s Team Disney headquarters in Burbank, California.

Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron not only reunites and introduces a formidable and popular cast of Marvel characters – it also saw the re-assembling of several formidable visual effects studios t

If a friend told you that we were all living in a giant hologram, you'd probably tell him to lay off the kush. But incredibly, physicists across the world are thinking the same thing: That what we per

Second in a series. Part 1 here . Part 3 here . Siri can understand what you say. Google can take dictation. Even your new smart TV is taking verbal orders. So is there any doubt the National Security

First in a series. Part 2 here . Part 3 here . Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record. But even as

Last month, at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka gave a 29-minute speech in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a

CANCUN, Mexico — In 2009, one or more prestigious researchers received a CD by mail that contained pictures and other materials from a recent scientific conference they attended in Houston. The scientists didn't know it then, but the disc also delivered a malicious payload developed by a highly…

Spring 2015 This Magic Moment Eight years after it aired, the finale of The Sopranos continues to be hotly debated. David Chase explains how he created the excruciating tension of the last scene. What

One of my favourite things about cape comics is the might of the moniker. Names, concepts and symbols that grow in popularity and eventually take on a certain meaning in the public consciousness, many of them recognizable since well before superheroes were all the rage. Often times Marvel and DC…