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Literature & Culture

A World of Electric Children

Science fiction author Ted Chiang wrote the story for the Academy Award–winning film Arrival. Now his new collection of short stories gives us further glimpses of possible futures.

War & Security

Watching the End of the World

The Doomsday Clock is set to two minutes to midnight—the same position it held in 1953, when the United States and USSR detonated their first hydrogen bombs. So why don't we make movies about nuclear war anymore?

Forum

Why the Labor Movement Has Failed—And How to Fix It

Traditional worker organizing has failed on every level. But new approaches are finding success, pointing the way to a more just future.

Sarita Gupta, Stephen Lerner, Joseph A. McCartin

Literature & Culture

Race in Black and White

Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art.

Alexis L. Boylan

Politics

Choosing Hope

Noam Chomsky and Scott Casleton discuss socialism, anarchism, and the fight for progress in U.S. politics today.

Noam Chomsky, Scott Casleton

Race

Black Resistance in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley

In Revilletown, which was founded by freed slaves, a petrochemical company has seized ownership of an ancestral cemetery. But an attack on the dead is an attack on the living.

Law & Justice

How Cars Transformed Policing

Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.

Literature & Culture

Walt Whitman’s Boys

On the poet’s bicentennial, we will see praise for his political idealism and gauzy reclamations of him as an LGBT ancestor. But it remains difficult to talk about the connection he saw between patriotism and his love of young men.

Jeremy Lybarger

Class & Inequality

The False Promise of Enlightenment

Three new books paint a chilling portrait of darkness in Wall Street, the law, and technology. But the apocalyptic metaphors obscure the real problem, hindering how we fight back.

Quinn Slobodian

Politics, Race

“Every Crucifixion Needs a Witness”

William J. Barber II on the the successes of civil disobedience, the failures of electoral campaigns, and why the South holds the key to transformation in this country.

Toussaint Losier, William J. Barber II

Class & Inequality

Apple's Newest Store and the Perverse Logic of Philanthro-Capitalism

The Apple Carnegie Library embodies recent developments in philanthropy that should trouble us: the uncritical valorization of philanthro-capitalism and the privatization of public goods and public spaces.

Benjamin Soskis

Forum

How Race Made the Opioid Crisis

The opioid crisis and the War on Drugs are intertwined in the mutually reinforcing framework of racial capitalism.

Science & Nature

Defensible Space

“Could You Do Any Better Than We Did?”

William T. Vollmann, Ted Hamilton

Who's Your Daddy?

The Defeat of Reason

Programming My Child

The Sins of “Smart” Cities

Climate Gut Check

No Collision

Nature Defends Itself

Dayton Martindale

Education & Opportunity

In the Name of Victims

Kristin Bumiller

Scholars in Exile

Teaching Citizenship

A Brown v. Board for Higher Ed

Marshall Steinbaum

Teachers with Guns

The Dream Hoarders: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

Richard V. Reeves

The Erotics of Mentorship

Marta Figlerowicz, Ayesha Ramachandran

The Slow and Fast Assault on Public Education

Henry A. Giroux

We Don’t Need No Education?

Jeffrey Aaron Snyder

READING LISTS

Get Organized

READING LIST

“Organizing is the strategy on which the success of all others depend. Yet it is the strategy that most progressives talk about the least.”

Abortion’s Past and Future

READING LIST

“I was a teenager back then, pregnant and desperate. Too terrified to make the midnight trip to the back alley.”

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