In 1848, at a time when Black families were routinely ripped apart and Black bodies were bought and sold in public squares as chattel, a Black man and his mixed-race wife pulled off one of the most daring and ingenious feats of self-emancipation imaginable. Defying conventions of race, class, and gender, William and Ellen Craft […]
Books
Book reviews and essays from the Washington Monthly on the new books shaping debates over politics, policy, history, and American democracy.
Posted inBooks
Medicine at the Mercy of Wall Street
The pharmaceutical industry is the great white whale of American medicine. No matter how many harpoons activists, progressive politicians, journalists, and scholars hurl at its bloated body, it not only survives, it grows fatter by feasting on the patients and payers that are the krill of the U.S. health care system. The drug price controls […]
Posted inJanuary/February/March 2023
The Plumbers Who Couldn’t Fix a Leak
For me, the puzzle of Watergate is why Richard Nixon, who wasn’t responsible for the Democratic National Committee break-in, decided to lead the cover-up just days after the burglary undertaken by a band of White House–led dirty tricksters known as “the Plumbers.” What made the president order the CIA to shut down the FBI probe […]
Posted inBooks
The Courage and Compromises of George P. Shultz
When he died, at the age of 100, in 2021, George P. Shultz was widely hailed as a consummate pragmatist who represented a type of sober conservatism that has been almost entirely eradicated in the modern Republican Party. A charter member of the foreign policy establishment, he occupied four cabinet positions, including secretary of labor […]
Posted inBooks
Donald Trump Is No Grover Cleveland
We are cursed to live in a time when Donald Trump’s grotesque shadow hangs over almost any topic of political or cultural conversation. So if you read Troy Senik’s new biography, A Man of Iron, about the life of Grover Cleveland, you can’t help but try to detect any relevant parallels between the one person […]
Posted inBooks
Trust Fund U
In January 2021, when the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would hear an appeal challenging Harvard’s use of racial preferences in college admissions, the institution’s president, Larry Bacow, sent a note to the university community positioning Harvard as a righteous champion of social justice. The Court, he wrote, was threatening Harvard’s ability “to create […]
Posted inJanuary/February/March 2023
Ted Kennedy’s Lonely Liberalism
Liberalism is under assault. Already having suffered decades of reputational damage after Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan battered the word into oblivion, it is now rare to ever hear it with a positive connotation. The right wing continues to equate it with moral decadence and fiscal recklessness, while the hard left of the Democratic Socialists […]
Posted inMagazine
How the Republican Fringe Became the Mainstream
Conspiracy theorists and far-right fanatics have long been present in the GOP. Now, they’re running it.
Posted inMagazine
A Woman’s Right to Not Be in the News
Privacy law has traditionally helped powerful men at the expense of vulnerable women. Can it be recast?
Posted inMagazine
Do Prisons Need to Be Hellholes?
Thanks to bipartisan efforts, the number of incarcerated Americans has shrunk dramatically. The next step for reform is to treat inmates more humanely.
