Person

Nicholas Lemann

Bylines

Can the 1980s Explain 2024?

The yuppies embodied the winning side of America’s deepening economic divide. Bruce Springsteen spoke for those left behind.

by Nicholas Lemann via Washington Monthly on August 25, 2024
A Big Tent

The contradictory past and uncertain future of the Democratic Party.

by Nicholas Lemann via The Nation on July 11, 2022
J.F.K.’s “Profiles in Courage” Has a Racism Problem. What Should We Do About It?

Kennedy defined courage as a willingness to take an unpopular stand in service of a larger, higher cause. But what cause?

by Nicholas Lemann via The New Yorker on July 23, 2020
Is Capitalism Racist?

A scholar depicts white supremacy as the economic engine of American history.

by Nicholas Lemann via The New Yorker on May 18, 2020
Jefferson, Adams, and the SAT’s New Adversity Factor

Discussions of admissions to élite colleges are built around the idea that somewhere around the next bend is the right way to do it.

by Nicholas Lemann via The New Yorker on May 23, 2019
What to Do with Monuments Whose History We’ve Forgotten

Few who are memorialized in stone could fully pass moral muster today. Is that a problem?

by Nicholas Lemann via The New Yorker on November 26, 2017
Hating on Herbert Hoover

Hoover was a brilliant manager, a wizard of logistics, and an effective humanitarian. Why do we remember him as a failure?

by Nicholas Lemann via The New Yorker on October 23, 2017
The Price of Union

The undefeatable South.

by Nicholas Lemann via The New Yorker on November 2, 2015
Who Was W.E.B. Du Bois?

A review of "Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity," by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

by Nicholas Lemann via New York Review of Books on September 24, 2014
The Fate of Earth Day

What has gone wrong with the modern environmental movement and its political organizing.

by Nicholas Lemann via The New Yorker on April 8, 2013

Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing

Nicholas Lemann

Viewing 1–5 of 5

A standardized test and a pencil, with answers bubbled in.

The Rotting of the College Board

Testing is necessary. The SAT’s creator is not.

by Naomi Schaefer Riley via Commentary on November 13, 2024

The Long Roots of Corporate Irresponsibility

Nicholas Lemann’s history of 20th century corporations, Transaction Man, shows how an unrelenting faith in the market and profit doomed the American economy.

by Rick Perlstein via The Nation on March 17, 2020

Former President Donald Trump with his attorneys inside the courtroom during his arraignment at the Manhattan Criminal Court on April 4, 2023.

A Brief History of the Ku Klux Klan Acts

These 1870s laws to protect Black voters, ignored for decades, now being used against Trump.

by Joseph Kelly via The Conversation on August 4, 2023

The University of Texas’s Secret Strategy to Keep Out Black Students

Long-hidden documents show the school’s blueprint for slowing integration during the civil-rights era.

by Asher Price via The Atlantic on September 19, 2019

Young men show a reporter how to make molotov cocktails in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, in July 1966. (Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Getty Images)

One of America's Smartest Magazines Published a Molotov Cocktail How-To in 1967

A riot represents people making history.

by Nina Renata Aron via Timeline on September 23, 2017

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