A Red with an FBI Badge

On reactionary novelist James Ellroy and his Underworld USA trilogy’s surprising treatment of communism and anticommunism.

Change the People

A recent book on musician Fred Ho reveals some starting points for a modern radical avant-garde.

Reading Jhumpa Lahiri Politically

Jhumpa Lahiri’s failure in The Lowland is not one of style, but of sensibility. She has little investment in the spirit of the Naxalite movement she chooses to depict.

Bad Science

Free-market academic research policies have unleashed medical quackery and scientific fraud, forcing consumers to pay premiums for discoveries we’ve already funded as taxpayers.

Unmaking Global Capitalism

Nine things to know about organizing in the belly of the beast.

No Shortcuts

The need to develop a strategy that can cohere the different parts of our movement has never been clearer.

Free the Land: An Interview with Chokwe Lumumba

Chokwe Lumumba discusses popular power and the past and future of revolutionary struggle in the American South.

Pink Collar

Waiting for SCOTUS

By fixating on the Supreme Court, liberals have inherited the framers’ skepticism of popular sovereignty and mass politics.

Occupy After Occupy

Its critics may disagree, but Occupy Wall Street’s legacy has been an enduring one.

Capital Eats the World

Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows that not everything in mainstream economics is worthless.

A General Without an Army

For all Piketty’s mainstream respectability, it is only the radical left and the labor movement — not treasuries and central banks — that can push his program.

The European Conundrum

With last week’s elections, commentators are heralding the “end of Europe,” but the evidence tells a different story.

Piketty’s Fair-Weather Friends

Piketty’s warnings of a capitalism without meritocracy are being challenged by an ossified economic theory.

Not Another Piketty Symposium

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been covered ad nauseam. But how it will change the ideological landscape remains to be seen.

Detroit’s Radical

General Baker spent his life in struggle on the streets and in the auto plants of Detroit.

When Intellectuals Go to War

When it comes to the narcissism of war, no one has quite the self-deluding capacity of the intellectual.

The Intractability of Op-Ed Habits

Has the New York Times ever disavowed its condescending editorials on the Civil Rights Movement?

Sheryl Sandberg and Harvard’s Housekeepers

Speaking at Harvard this week, Sandberg “sent word she does not have time to host a ‘Lean In circle’ with the hotel employees.”

Which Working Families Party?

With next week’s gubernatorial endorsement, we may finally reach the limits of the Working Families Party’s “inside-outside” strategy.