Guest Essays

A declaration of victory by the Maduro regime is another case of how democracy is backsliding in Latin America.

By Michael Albertus

When art changes opinions or opens hearts, it changes the world as profoundly as any legislation does.

By Margaret Renkl

Its refusal to lower interest rates is a mistake.

By Jen Harris

Fishing the ocean’s twilight zone could unleash climate chaos.

By Porter Fox

Voters deserve transparency.

By Robert Klitzman

Until we narrow the scope of what police officers can do, we’ll continue to see officers bring violence into situations that don’t require it.

By Tahir Duckett

She will need a message that reconnects the Democratic Party with the working-class voters it has alienated in recent decades.

By Michael J. Sandel

Politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom.

By Armando Iannucci

We don’t let preadolescent kids work. Why do we let them appear in the most high-pressure athletic contests on a global stage?

By Linda Flanagan

The former president is praising the era when tariffs fueled the federal budget — and also caused social dislocation and financial instability.

By Steven R. Weisman

The streaming era turned on a fire hose of content that’s drowning viewers. We need TV that feels created by humans, not served up by an algorithm.

By Priyanka Mattoo

Organizers must reduce the event’s carbon footprint.

By Madeleine Orr

It is clear Venezuelans have chosen to oust President Maduro. Whether that will happen remains in question.

By María Corina Machado

She may yet add to her impressive Olympic legacy in Paris. But by changing the way we talk about mental health, Simone Biles has scored a different victory.

By Julie Kliegman

We have the tools we need to stop the disease in 2024. Let’s use them.

By Ina Park

China could seize control of a strategically vital waterway without firing a shot.

By Oriana Skylar Mastro

On Sunday the president selflessly let go of the reins but not before ensuring we were in good hands.

By Jeffrey Katzenberg

In cobbling together a core constituency of voters who are both culturally conservative and financially hard-pressed, they are changing politics.

By Thomas B. Edsall

With Netanyahu’s visit, Congress can’t ignore its role in Gaza’s carnage.

By Megan K. Stack

When political violence is on the rise, accountability at all levels of society is the only way to stop it.

By Alex Kingsbury

Coconut trees and Republican missteps.

By Frank Bruni, Mallory McMorrow and Simon Rosenberg

Don’t Take Trump’s Word for It. Check the Data.

By Steven Rattner and Aileen Clarke

I’ve been called a witch, a “nasty woman” and much worse. Harris will face unique additional challenges. But we shouldn’t be afraid.

By Hillary Rodham Clinton

Conspiracy theorists have been able to fill the information void with their own versions of the truth.

By Gerald Posner and Mark S. Zaid

Sorting out whether she’s an upgrade for Democrats.

By Kristen Soltis Anderson

She faces a moment different from when she ran for president in the 2020 cycle.

By Nicole Allan

Trump’s consolidated control of the G.O.P. has had the surprising effect of making its policies more, not less, unsettled.

By Julius Krein

What to know about a new U.S. policy.

By Tom Inglesby, Anita Cicero and Marc Lipsitch

The ethical thing to do is to bring mining back and hold it to the highest sustainability standards.

By Stephen Lezak

Turkey’s four million stray dogs are inseparable from the idea of the country itself. But maybe not for much longer.

By Kaya Genc

Joe Biden must have accepted that he is yesterday and chose to let the party move on.

By David Paul Kuhn

History will remember what this former lion of the Senate accomplished from the West Wing to improve Black communities across the nation.

By Al Sharpton

The shameless presence of white supremacists here tells us something about the similarity between the politics of the past and our political moment.

By Margaret Renkl

He never surrendered the hope that a frail and fallible world could be made stronger if people could summon enough goodness and courage to build, rather than tear down.

By Jon Meacham

We need to rethink how we assess and evaluate physical and mental fitness for the presidency.

By Jeffrey Kuhlman

What would President Bartlet do?

By Aaron Sorkin

Prayers at events such as the Republican National Convention can take on the feel of a religious veneer for certain policies.

By Esau McCaulley and Thalassa Raasch and Damon Winter

Have translation tools made learning a language pointless? Not a chance.

By Mark Vanhoenacker

With JD Vance at his back, the former president has cemented his legacy.

By Michael Lind

Center-left parties must lead the way to restore the social contract that binds democracies together.

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Roe is history, but abortion hasn’t ended.

By Patrick T. Brown

Times Opinion writers assess Night 4 of the Republican convention, which included speeches from Hulk Hogan, Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump.

By New York Times Opinion

The United States can support Venezuelan democracy by creating an offramp for President Nicolás Maduro.

By Roberto Patiño

Disaster movies make for thrilling blockbusters. But the reality of a changing climate is slow-motion tragedy, broken bureaucracy and lingering tedium.

By Chris Vognar

For his convention speech, Donald Trump faces a new, more promising rhetorical and political situation.

By Charles R. Kesler

Times Opinion writers assess Night 3 of the convention, which included speeches from Peter Navarro, Kimberly Guilfoyle and J.D. Vance.

By New York Times Opinion

None of the women on the Olympic team live in Afghanistan, nor could they visit without risking their lives. They deserve places on the refugee team.

By Friba Rezayee

Gen X’s quintessential bad girl was never really all that bad.

By Jennifer Weiner

No disingenuous spin blitz by his loyalists or flurry of teleprompter-driven campaign events can lift the heavy weight sinking the president.

By Mike Murphy

Exactly what the vice-presidential candidate has renounced in exchange for power is in the public record for all to see.

By Ed Simon

What our columnists and contributors thought of speeches from Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elise Stefanik on the event’s second night.

By New York Times Opinion

This diminutive fish has been making other things taste great for millenniums.

By Christopher Beckman

The Republican nominee has the opportunity to rein in some of the worst rhetorical impulses of his party and point it in a new direction.

By Chris Christie

The former president was probably thinking of 2028 and beyond — and where he wants the G.O.P. to go.

By Matthew Continetti

Why Republicans are jubilant and Democrats are despondent.

By Kristen Soltis Anderson

We have less information than ever before about the impact that our underregulated social media platforms have on our politics.

By Julia Angwin

Here’s what our columnists and contributors thought of the opening night for Republicans in Milwaukee.

By New York Times Opinion

The data that meters generate must be standardized and widely available to be useful. Right now it mostly isn’t.

By Michael E. Murray

Eight federal judges have rejected the claim that Judge Aileen Cannon has now endorsed that no law authorizes the appointment of a special counsel.

By Neal K. Katyal

The assassination attempt against Trump is one on a long list of attacks.

By Matthew Dallek and Robert Dallek

Eliminating the tipped minimum wage and raising the minimum wage for all workers would help working people far more than a tax cut on tipped wages.

By Lauren Hough

In the real world, noble ideals don’t guarantee a victory.

By Elizabeth Spiers

Southern grassland ecosystems, and nearly all the plants and animals they supported, are gone. There is hope of bringing some of them back to life.

By Margaret Renkl

Replenishing sand is likely to become economically untenable and logistically impractical. But that doesn’t spell the end of beaches.

By Sarah Stodola

We need a safer, kinder and more effective approach to treating troubled teenagers.

By Maia Szalavitz

Many leaders have faced a similar situation. There are simple solutions.

By Adam Grant

The protests and political action of young Kenyans in recent weeks marks a seismic shift for the country.

By Carey Baraka

It is a social form of sclerosis that will persist unless and until more power is transferred from the wrinkled to the rest.

By Samuel Moyn

I pray we learn the right lessons from this awful event.

By Patti Davis

Enough! It’s time for Democrats to stop the bickering and nit-picking.

By Bernie Sanders

Delegates have the power to choose a new nominee at the convention.

By Daniel Schlozman

Under the blazing sun, cows move slowly. That’s a lesson for us humans to take to heart, too.

By Gregory Berns

The notion that you, too, can rise from the Barrio to Hollywood through sheer grit doesn’t speak to a generation disillusioned with the myth of meritocracy.

By Yarimar Bonilla

The best supplements are exercise, a good diet and strong relationships.

By Brad Stulberg

I saw Biden three weeks ago at my fund-raiser for him. It’s devastating to say it, but he is not the same man he was, and he won’t win this fall.

By George Clooney

For many young Iranians, as long as an octogenarian cleric and his allies rule over their country, the country can’t be free.

By Holly Dagres

It isn’t too late to start a constructive conversation about aging and leadership.

By Clark Hoyt

In the case of the former president, it is far more dangerous to underestimate than to overestimate his capacity to wreak havoc.

By Thomas B. Edsall

Programmed to find the fastest route without consideration of literally anything else, driving apps endanger and infuriate us on a remarkably regular basis.

By Julia Angwin

The U.S. national security adviser argues that America’s allies in NATO are pulling their weight and paying their fair share of the costs of a common defense.

By Jake Sullivan

A fiction writer challenges an A.I. chatbot to a duel.

By Curtis Sittenfeld

He is gravitating toward the extreme fringes of the conservative legal world.

By Jay Willis

Through a stunning act of collective responsibility, the far right has been stopped.

By David Broder

It’s essential that NATO members agree on how they see the war in Ukraine.

By Jaroslaw Kuisz and Karolina Wigura

The party needs a new presidential nominee and can’t rig things for any one candidate.

By James Carville

Justice Amy Coney Barrett has found her voice.

By Stephen I. Vladeck

After we survived one round of economic Russian roulette, Donald Trump is asking us to take another spin, only this time with many more bullets in the chamber.

By Robert E. Rubin and Kenneth I. Chenault

There’s a better way to think about gender identity in all of us.

By Jack Turban

An illness led Stephen Smith to study why America has so few elevators. What he learned explains why housing costs are so high.

By Stephen Jacob Smith

Green energy is caught in red tape.

By Robinson Meyer