Contributing writer

Henry N. Brooks

Latest Content


Why Harvard?

You’ll find yourself a recent graduate, head still halfway full of Shakespeare or Marx or Joseph Conrad, wondering whether it’s worth venturing your partial answer to the eternal question – “Why Harvard?” — for whichever undergraduates might happen to lend an ear.


What’s In a Story?

I worry that by foreclosing on conventional journalistic wisdom like interviewing all sides in a story, we expose ourselves to a far more pernicious danger than the chance of a one-time snitch or even the brief, suspicious gaze of the state.


The God of American Public Life is Dead

The God of today’s GOP is an impoverished divinity — little more than a signal of the right’s confirmation bias.


Give Left-Capitalism a Chance

Call it left-capitalism: an economic system that democratizes the benefits of the marketplace. That — more than socialism — is the new dominant philosophy of the Democratic Party.


How America’s Empire Got the Upper Hand

Rana’s reading of history is a powerful one for the present day, when politics forces us to choose, falsely, between two visions of America: one that ignores our national sins and another that cannot forgive them.


How Past Generations Thought Differently about the Economy

Are we missing something important about the quality and dignity of labor in the American economy, as so many Democrats — particularly from the party’s progressive wing — would have us believe?