Mixed Martial Messages
What kind of violence is acceptable?
Books
America's Cross-Partisan Dalliance With Eugenics
A new book pulls the curtain back—but only partway.
Autonomous Mexico
What happened when some indigenous people took their lands back from the state
When Kidnappings Were All the Rage
With panic in the air, federal law enforcement seized the moment.
City Building and Black Power
That time a civil rights activist teamed up with Richard Nixon to build a black-run town in rural North Carolina
Rethinking the Power To Take a Life
America's approach to capital punishment changed in the 1970s. It's time for another look.
Wanted: A Better Way To Think About Health Care
If social insurance plans had been designed by libertarian-leaning policy mechanics, what might they have produced?
The Myth of Antonio Salazar
The integralist right's foolish crush on the man who once ruled Portugal
A Declassified Case Against Torture
Retired FBI agent Ali Soufan argues that the agency's thirst for torture made it harder to protect Americans.
Why We (Still) Shouldn't Censor Misinformation
It strains credulity to believe random tweets can lead otherwise normal people to drive across the country and stage an insurrection.
A Radical History of Tennis?
Despite some interesting tidbits, a new history of the game falls short.
Was the Reagan Revolution Really Reagan's?
While we're at it, was it really a revolution?
Miracles and Magic
The desire to know one's fortune seems to be an instinctive human urge.
Americans and Their Foreign Entanglements
Nothing in U.S. history suggests that ordinary Americans are isolationists—but nothing suggests they've embraced international adventurism either.
The Truth About the Free Market Family
Maxine Eichner's The Free-Market Family laments the bad public policy that makes it hard for parents to juggle work and child care, but often arrives at the wrong solutions.
Into the Dugout
Jim Bouton pulled back the curtain on the MLB and changed the perception of sports forever.
The Nationalism-ists
The members of Steve Bannon's international circle share an outlandish spiritual-historic vision, but their threat to liberty is more mundane.
The Weird Beauty of Suburbia
How can a place that we're intimately familiar with—more than half of America lives in the suburbs—be so unknowable?
Salvaging Secession
The Founders understood union as a strategic necessity, not a moral imperative.
The Long, Dark History of Family Separations
How politicians used the drug war and the welfare state to break up black and Native American families
Seeing Like an Anarchist
How former slaves built an autonomous, self-sufficient, and nearly stateless society in the mountains of Haiti, and how they lost it
Will Anyone Ever Be Able To Build Again in San Francisco?
How did California's housing shortage happen and why is it so intractable?
The Sins and Virtues of New Religions
Occultists, social justice warriors, and techno-utopians may not look like the Christians of yore, but they're more religious than they realize.
Indians and Aliens
Human beings' disturbing capacity to manufacture history to serve our own ends
Drugs and Ammo
A look at war through the lens of the performance enhancers that help make it possible
Scary Stories About Vaping Aren't Helping Anyone
Feel free to reject the advice of this terrible new book.
No, Segregationists Weren't the Driving Force Behind School Choice
The anti-voucher polemic is augmented by historical half-truths and selective omissions of countervailing evidence.
The Late Murray Rothbard Takes on the Constitution
A lost volume of American history finds the light of day.
How We Lost the War on Poverty
Amity Shlaes concludes in her new book that grand governmental schemes to broadly reorder society are doomed to fail.
Understanding Ellison
In a new collection of letters, the great Invisible Man author is further revealed.
A Kurdish Experiment in Decentralized Governance
The Kurds of Northern Syria are trying something different, for better or worse.
Good Riddance to the Roman Empire
Maybe Rome needed to disintegrate before the West could grow wealthy.
'Jane Jacobs Goals Through Robert Moses Tactics'
Community planners don't have all the answers.
When Border Defense Becomes Border Offense
Militarized borders and military intervention are two sides of the same coin.
How Truth Became a Casualty of the War on Smoking
Different types of nicotine consumption pose different amounts of risk.
An Incomplete Map of Uberland
In its eagerness to make the case against Uber, a new book makes a pretty good case for Uber.
The Myth of the 'Opium War'
The vast majority of opium users in China were not the desperate addicts portrayed by proponents of prohibition.
The Creek Nation and the Culture of Consent
Under threat from the United States, Creek people replaced consent with coercion. Then they lost everything.
