Politics

Law & Justice, Politics

The Problem Isn't Just Police—It's Politics

In this interview, sociologist Alex Vitale explains how the policing crisis in the United States begins with politics—the decision to embrace neoliberal austerity and to turn the social problems it creates over to police.

Alex Vitale, Scott Casleton

Politics

Confederates in the Capitol

The National Statuary Collection announced the unification of the former slave economy’s emotional heartland with the heart of national government.

William Hogeland

Law & Justice, Politics

A Perfect Storm of Vulnerabilities Could Determine the 2020 Election

Here’s what we should do.

Jake Braun

Law & Justice, Politics

Power over Policing

A new special project from Boston Review. 

Politics, Race

America’s Long War on Children and Families

A new book shows how Trump’s family separation policy belongs to a much longer history of U.S. government forces—alongside state and local entities—taking children from families deemed inimical to the idealized American family form.

Paul M. Renfro

Arts in Society, Politics

A New Age of Protest Music

Through online fan communities and digital platforms like TikTok, popular music is finding powerful new ways to shape everyday activism, protest, and resistance.

Byrd McDaniel

Politics

The Politics of the Mask

Today we face the paradox of states simultaneously criminalizing masks—because of protests—and mandating them because of COVID-19. In this interview, social theorist AK Thompson explores the history of masks in protests and why rioting is politically effective.

AK Thompson, Clare O’Connor

Politics, War & Security

The Future of U.S. Global Leadership

The assumption that only the United States can lead the free world increasingly looks imperiled, most recently by the COVID-19 pandemic. What would foreign policy look like without it?

Jeremy Shapiro

Class & Inequality, Politics

A Politics of the Future

Despite the myth that deaths of the elderly are never untimely, the author mourns a friend, fifty years his senior, who succumbed to COVID-19. She taught him that a moral life entails wanting those rewards not only for yourself but for everyone.

Simon Waxman

Politics

Protest, Passion, Politics

As protests work to remake the world, the reissue of Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism invites a new generation to reflect on what it means to live a life of political commitment—where the passionate pursuit of justice meets organized political action.

Alan Wald

Class & Inequality, Politics

When Will Capitalism End?

Rumors of the imminent death of capitalism have often been greatly exaggerated. But that doesn’t mean we must give up on making things better.

Alyssa Battistoni

Gender & Sexuality, Politics

Without Women There Is No Democracy

On the hundreth anniversary of suffrage, it’s time for gender equity in political office.

Jennifer M. Piscopo, Shauna L. Shames