The Year of Piketty
Thomas Piketty raised the Big Questions this year about democracy and inequality. Some students and I went looking for answers.
Jedediah Purdy is Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at the Duke University School of Law.
BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS
The American people didn’t demand that we torture detainees and embark on permanent war after 9/11. Our politicians and pundits did.
ART 1, LIFE 0
The popularity of Suzanne Collins’s series suggests it has caught something many Americans sense: This is not the best we can do.
THE SAME, ONLY WORSE
Our courts have always been political. And as our political life grows more divided and acrimonious, so will our legal system.
The Law in All its Majesty
The problem runs far deeper, to an absurdly narrow legal definition of ‘corruption’ that throws democracy on the trash heap.
Forced Smile
Faking it is the new feudalism. Why the low pay and job insecurity that come with “emotional work” is creating a nation full of phonies.
Higher Education
“Economic diversity” is the latest higher-ed buzz phrase for lower-income students—but it conceals more than it reveals.
In/Equality
Americans pride themselves on an egalitarian society open to all. But some equality and inequality exist uneasily side by side. And the U.S. has never resolved this contradiction.
History, Not Ended
Obama 2008, Occupy Wall Street, and Moral Mondays—no, they haven’t changed the world, but they certainly haven’t been failures either.
The Big Idea
Operating on elitism and mystique, America’s highest court is increasingly a threat to our ideal of self-government—leading to an important debate about how to fix it.