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My building is not very tall but it is wide, with wings folding out from the lobby like a parliament. Legally speaking it is a co-op; our landlord converted it in the 1990s in a real estate ploy, then bought and sublet nearly all the shares. When quarantine began, the world shrank to the building’s…

Once, when my parents were visiting, I broke this tacit compact on a drive to Philadelphia with my mother and her cousin Janet. Janet and her son had been in a heated email exchange about whether Israel was an apartheid state, and then, she said, his emails had simply stopped coming. “Well, and so …

History, we were told in the 1990s, was something that happened to other people. The recent past was littered with code-named police actions that, rendered pointless by the evaporation of the cold war, no longer even had the dignity of the unmentionable. Conservatives kept building monuments to the…

Both of these selectively held views rely on a fantasy that voters—that is, responsible voters, not the kind who fall prey to base desires—navigate a simple, unmediated relationship between what they like and what should be. Thus, judging by the frequency with which the argument is made, one of the…

One point is that there is a very clear geographical dimension to the recurrent cycles of material and financial expansion, but you can see this aspect only if you do not stay focused on one particular country—because then you see a totally different process. This is what most historians have been …