What is the good life? The old American Dream offers an answer: It’s individually achieved affluence. It’s the indulgences promised by magazine sweepstakes: a 40-foot yacht, a deluxe motor home, a ...

“Imagining the impossible is what people have been doing in the struggle for liberation,” says academic and activist Ruthie Wilson Gilmore in a conversation about her latest book. For more than 30 ...

As a new, saner administration sets up shop in Washington, D.C., there are plenty of policy initiatives this country desperately needs. Beyond a national plan for the COVID-19 pandemic, progressives ...

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned—and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments.

Our relationship with work can be summed up in two words: It’s complicated. Here in the United States (and elsewhere, too), work dominates our lives. Upon meeting someone new, our standard first ...

The little city of Hazen, North Dakota, population 2,300, is the kind of town where farming and ranching families often have a second income from a job at a power plant or a coal mine. As a teenager, ...

The author of "Braiding Sweetgrass" on how human people are only one manifestation of intelligence in the living world. The intelligence of plants has long been a theme of literature, philosophy, and ...

Charles Battle’s voice, gentle and soft, is little more than a whisper when he recalls his time at war. No visible scars give testimony to his tour in Vietnam, but when he talks about his combat ...

My arms hurt as I walked through Brooklyn on a cold December night. I was carrying a 10-pound, party-size tray of macaroni and cheese with three cheeses, cooked to just a touch beyond al dente, with a ...

Desiree Pilgrim-Hunter never dreamed she’d become an activist. “I was just a mom concerned about school overcrowding,” she says, until a neighbor invited her to a meeting of a local community ...

A child growing up in the Costa Rican countryside is surrounded by some of the most beautiful and biodiverse landscapes in the world. The government of this tiny Central American country aims to keep ...

When we broke ground for a garden at our 80-year-old house in the middle of Seattle, we took the most obvious thing for granted. Again and again, we crisscrossed the yard surrounding our new home, ...