By the late 2010s, China’s “social credit system” (SCS) was increasingly viewed as a notorious government effort to monitor personal behavior, shape public conduct, and control access to services. While the system traces back to the 2000s, it was officially expanded and formalized in...

In 2012, in Turlock, California, 50,000 hens were abandoned in an egg farm. Every one of those trapped birds embodied a tragic irony. Birds can fly in the sky, unassisted by metal structures or fossil fuels. They are emblematic of freedom. “Free as a bird,”...

After the end of World War II, the U.S. employer class—the capitalists—faced overlapping threats, both domestic and foreign. On the domestic side, a coalition of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), two socialist parties, and a communist party had grown large and powerful during the...

President Donald Trump has tapped a former board member of the private mail delivery corporation FedEx to be the next United States Postmaster General. David Steiner’s appointment as head of the public service agency is a signal that Trump is going to take another...

Tonya Clark sat in her car along the side of the road—sobbing—after the doctor’s office called to say she had breast cancer. ...

A 2020 study by the Institute of Psychology, Russian Academy of Sciences researcher Tina Kubrak is one of many reports showing that movies can powerfully influence attitudes on factors like sexual orientation, transgenderism, gender roles, ethnicity, and mental illness. ...

Imagine you are a low-income country. You suffer from a heavy debt burden. You’ve been trying to catch up to the more affluent countries for decades, but you’ve been unsuccessful, mainly because of that debt hanging around your neck like a giant millstone. And you...

Despite Donald Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025, his administration began enforcing that initiative’s agenda immediately after his second inauguration. This includes efforts to erase history through education cuts, classroom and book censorship, website scrubbing, and the silencing of media outlets and...

In 1989, 22.8 percent of America’s total net worth belonged to the top 1 percent of the nation’s wealth holders. By 2024, that share had risen to 30.8 percent, according to the online publisher Visual Capitalist. ...

Without archaeology, there is no way to truly examine economic inequality, its causes, and its consequences over very long time spans on a global scale. Until recently, most grand narratives that purported to tell the story of human inequality over time tended to focus either...