Daniel Immerwahr
Daniel Immerwahr is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of “How to Hide an Empire” and “Thinking Small.” Immerwahr received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities, at Northwestern University.
Donald Trump Was Never an Isolationist
He once defied the G.O.P. by blasting military interventions. But what looked like anti-interventionism is really a preference for power freed from the pretense of principle.
Did Racial Capitalism Set the Bronx on Fire?
To some, the fires lit in New York in the late seventies signalled rampant criminality; to others, rebellion. But maybe they were signs of something else entirely.
The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen
From a dying adviser to a clumsy editorial, the Revolution was a cascade of accidents and oversights.
Why Donald Trump Is Obsessed with a President from the Gilded Age
William McKinley led a country defined by tariffs and colonial wars. There’s a reason Trump is so drawn to his legacy—and so determined to bring the liberal international order to an end.
Just Asking Questions
From the daily newsletter: How Americans came to mistrust the government. Plus: Donald Trump race-baits South Africa’s leader; and what to watch this summer.
R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise
It used to be progressives who distrusted the experts. What happened?
What if the Attention Crisis Is All a Distraction?
From the pianoforte to the smartphone, each wave of tech has sparked fears of brain rot. But the problem isn’t our ability to focus—it’s what we’re focussing on.
The New Combustible Age
The Los Angeles fires hark to the nineteenth-century blazes that ravaged our cities—and point toward an even more flammable future.
How “The Golden Girls” Celebrated—and Distorted—Old Age
The sitcom reframed senior life as being about socializing and sex. But did the cultural narrative of advanced age as continued youth twist the dial too far?
What if Ronald Reagan’s Presidency Never Really Ended?
Anti-Trump Republicans revere Ronald Reagan as Trump’s opposite—yet in critical ways Reagan may have been his forerunner.
Were Pirates Foes of the Modern Order—or Its Secret Sharers?
We’ve long viewed them as liberty-loving rebels. But it’s time to take off the eye patch.
When the C.I.A. Messes Up
Its agents are often depicted as malevolent puppet masters—or as bumbling idiots. The truth is even less comforting.
What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On
From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential—psychologically and strategically—to solving the crisis of colonialism.
What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes
Experts have warned that utterly realistic A.I.-generated videos might wreak havoc through deception. What’s happened is troubling in a different way.
Beyond the Myth of Rural America
Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.
A Fire Started in Waco. Thirty Years Later, It’s Still Burning
Behind the Oklahoma City bombing and even the January 6th attack was a military-style assault in Texas that galvanized the far right.
Should America Still Police the World?
Two recent books, by Robert Gates and Patrick Porter, present starkly different visions for the future of the United States’ primacy in world affairs.