Contrary to the naive sirens of maximum democracy, greater transparency is as much a problem for good governance as it is a solution.

The U.S. budget process lies at the core of U.S. political dysfunction because it provides too many points of entry for the logic of collective action. It cannot be changed fundamentally, but it can be reformed at the margins.

If polarization and extreme partisanship in American politics are but skin-deep—problems caused by activists and professionals rather than the electorate as a whole—then reforms are possible. Happily, that’s the case.

A battle that should never have been fought inspired Shakespeare and shaped the collective mentalities of the first modern nation-states.

How the triumphalist mutation of liberalism and the anti-liberal politics of identity have together brought us to the age of exhaustion.

A conversation with Norman Blake, direct from Sulfur Springs, Georgia, somewhatly about American acoustic guitar music.

Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, famous for his best-selling 2005 book On Bullshit, takes on inequality.

Regulating the influence of television in U.S. politics is becoming less important than regulating the capacious influence of the internet—but the available methods are not remotely comparable.

The refugee crisis may not break the EU, but it will upend the postwar European political order.

Our cultural fascination with the Tudors continues, as Donizetti’s Anna Bolena takes the stage at the Met.