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

Michael Walzer struggles to explain the failure of secular liberation movements to overcome the religious cultures of the liberated.

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has managed to write a book on America’s racial dilemmas without involving either Barack Obama or Martin Luther King, Jr. Or has he?

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.

The World Bank’s special envoy for climate change came out against the creation of a climate slush fund. What that means for the Paris talks.

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.