Jedediah Purdy

Thomas Piketty raised the Big Questions this year about democracy and inequality. Some students and I went looking for answers.

The American people didn’t demand that we torture detainees and embark on permanent war after 9/11. Our politicians and pundits did.

The popularity of Suzanne Collins’s series suggests it has caught something many Americans sense: This is not the best we can do.

Our courts have always been political. And as our political life grows more divided and acrimonious, so will our legal system.

The problem runs far deeper, to an absurdly narrow legal definition of ‘corruption’ that throws democracy on the trash heap.

Faking it is the new feudalism. Why the low pay and job insecurity that come with “emotional work” is creating a nation full of phonies.

“Economic diversity” is the latest higher-ed buzz phrase for lower-income students—but it conceals more than it reveals.

Americans pride themselves on an egalitarian society open to all. But some equality and inequality exist uneasily side by side. And the U.S. has never resolved this contradiction.

Obama 2008, Occupy Wall Street, and Moral Mondays—no, they haven’t changed the world, but they certainly haven’t been failures either.

Operating on elitism and mystique, America’s highest court is increasingly a threat to our ideal of self-government—leading to an important debate about how to fix it.