Guest Essays

Races in New Jersey and Virginia are testing the power of the moderate lane.

By Thomas B. Edsall

False humor is simply a technique to neutralize the unpalatable.

By Roberta Kaplan and Michael Bloch

America’s self-inflicted soybean problem.

By Michael Grunwald

The United States isn’t exceptional because of our common culture; it’s exceptional because Americans have been able to cohere despite cultures that set us apart.

By Leighton Woodhouse

More than any other presidential actions, clemencies tell us who presidents are.

By Jeffrey Toobin

While what is happening to us is as serious as a guillotine, we must harness our best humorous selves in order to keep it from falling.

By Gary Shteyngart

Telling stories is how we make sense of life and what it means to be human.

By Margaret Renkl

Smartphones are becoming casinos. Trump, whose son is invested in the industry, is only goosing the business.

By Jonathan D. Cohen and Isaac Rose-Berman

The administration’s plan would defund the very intervention that has ended homelessness for people across the country.

By Philip Mangano

Literature is fragile. It serves no obvious purpose. But it is also as close to immortal as any cultural endeavor has ever been.

By Gerald Howard

Trying to find purpose in an endless scroll of A.I.-generated videos.

By Bobbie Johnson

Since the first election of President Trump, Hollywood has fretted about portraying rural and red state Americans. Some new TV series show how to get it right.

By Alan Sepinwall

Shutting out China’s best minds will only push them into a homegrown Chinese research ecosystem that is eclipsing American universities.

By Bethany Allen and Jenny Wong Leung

Democrats’ vision for the country won’t matter unless they can get people to pay attention to it.

By Chris Hayes

Virginia Roberts Giuffre spent so much of her life telling the story of her abuse.

By Amy Wallace

Why Congress should take up Insurrection Act reform.

By Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith

The Trump administration risks squandering the progress it has made in securing the border.

By Tom Suozzi

Who lost the debate may be clearer than who won.

By Mara Gay, Nicole Gelinas, Josh Barro and John Guida

Trump’s crypto windfall represents a mixing of personal and government interests at an unprecedented scale.

By Jacob Silverman

The secret of Donald Trump’s success with the Israeli prime minister was offering carrots on domestic politics — not sticks on foreign policy.

By Dana Stroul

The way to advance his worldview, he argues, is to show that it works.

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Generative A.I. can do many things human beings can do. But that misses the point about how A.I. can truly benefit us.

By Gary Marcus

I fear that my daughter’s experience is too often sidelined in favor of a more palatable version.

By Emily May

Thousands of hostages are still awaiting freedom.

By Andrew Ross

Will Black voters continue to have an opportunity to elect representatives of their choice, or will decades of hard-won progress disappear?

By Troy Carter and Cleo Fields

The best safeguard against tyranny is a legion of people who believe in an authority higher than any political program.

By Jonathan Freedland

An American bailout can carry the country only so far.

By Ricardo Hausmann

We are paying a tremendous political and psychological cost for access to social media.

By Thomas B. Edsall

Like the dot-com bust and the housing crisis, an implosion of the A.I. boom would hurt.

By Jared Bernstein and Ryan Cummings

Lessons from previous anti-immigrant sweeps don’t look good for the Trump administration.

By Gerald F. Seib

We long for community. Why do so few of us try to build it?

By Louise Perry

Is a powerful addiction treatment already invented?

By Maia Szalavitz

Drinking is down, but there are a few simple fixes that can get people hoisting their cans again.

By Mark Robichaux

What does it mean to be a “good” Muslim in America?

By Meher Ahmad

A principle is hollow if it’s not defended under pressure.

By Danielle Sassoon

And what that might mean for the future of American politics.

By Daniel K. Williams

Developing countries have started taking greater responsibility for their own welfare, leveraging private investment to create economic opportunity.

By Rajiv J. Shah

It’s too good to be true, and I’m OK with that.

By Joel Stein

What’s happening is shocking. It can get worse.

By Vic Mensa

While he is trying to sell it as a strategic win, the peace deal contradicts many of his coalition’s goals.

By Shira Efron

Our culture is amok with binaries. We have two major parties, just two, and they are forever opposed.

By Mark Edmundson

I’m here to tell you that you can stop cooking every night and your children will be just fine.

By Erin O. White

Patients’ mental health problems can make transplant decisions even more fraught.

By Daniela J. Lamas

The Power Four schools should go their own way and give other sports a chance to shine.

By James T. Harris

We’re arresting working parents, students, asylum seekers and even U.S. citizens to create made-for-TV crackdowns.

By Jason P. Houser

“Horseshoe” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

By Michael Hirschorn

Nixon famously had an enemies list. But there’s a difference between what happened then and what is happening now.

By Jeffrey Toobin

An apparent cash handoff is yet another star in the Trump administration’s constellation of ethics problems.

By Mark Lee Greenblatt

What the polling says, who’s up, who’s down — and when it might end.

By Frank Bruni, Kristen Soltis Anderson and Nate Silver

The government should not use public funds to support a system that fails to serve the public good.

By Marc Rowan

It belongs to us, and we can use it to rescue our democracy.

By Kate Andrias

A destructive A.I., like a nuclear bomb, is now a concrete possibility; the question is whether anyone will be reckless enough to build one.

By Stephen Witt

A deal offers some possibility of a broader solution, but the hurdles are enormous.

By Aaron David Miller

Cameroon is in thrall to Paul Biya.

By Shuimo Trust Dohyee

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker. But I can’t help rooting against the Yankees.

By David Margolick

Promises of peace between Jews and Palestinians must be turned into reality.

By Samer Sinijlawi

The leadership of Russia must understand that its attempt to rebuild Europe’s last empire is doomed to fail.

By Radosław Sikorski

America will be better off without nonstick pans: healthier, safer and perhaps even more skilled at cooking.

By Andrew Zimmern

People and institutions of civil society must coordinate against him.

By Henry J. Farrell

Under Trump, the N.I.H. is encouraging alternatives that use human cells rather than dogs, cats and monkeys.

By Deborah Blum

Until the recent U.S.-backed peace deal, Israel has continued to use force without engaging in any viable diplomacy. It must change to save itself.

By Mairav Zonszein

After all, there is “an enemy within.”

By Thomas B. Edsall

The president’s claims about cities don’t hold up.

By Stephen I. Vladeck

Despite some rude provocations, he outlined a nuanced vision of the military.

By Christopher Caldwell

Domestic coal can’t compete with batteries, solar and gas much longer.

By Seth Feaster and Dennis Wamsted

Share your energy bills for a forthcoming project about the demand of A.I. on the grid.

By Eliza Barclay

With humanities funding vanishing, stories and those who protect them remain our greatest hope.

By Margaret Renkl

This is worse than putting all your eggs in one basket.

By Natasha Sarin

To see a way out of our destructive spiral we should look to the innovation of the 1920s.

By John Fabian Witt

Dismissing candidates like Zohran Mamdani simply because of their youth is no longer viable. Millennial and Gen Z Americans will only gain more political influence.

By Jennifer Steinhauer