After a spell in a Marxist youth movement, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s constantly inventive music came to soundtrack the consumerist mania of the 1980s Japanese boom. But in his most recent work, the late composer turned back to experimentation and activism.
Run-ins with regulators, financial troubles, and a highly publicized penchant for dangerous risk was what Silicon Valley Bank was best known for in the decades before its collapse this year. So why was it allowed to grow so big, and so unregulated?
The Irish critic Seamus Deane grew up in Derry as a second-class citizen of a sectarian state. Taking inspiration from writers like Edward Said, Deane’s critical work exposed the legacies of colonialism and the failings of capitalist modernity in Ireland.
In 1970, Angela Davis was arrested on suspicion of murder. She was already the victim of red-baiting witch hunts led by conservatives, but the trial — and her eventual victory — proved to everyone that the justice system was corrupt.
Decades of rule by establishment politicians opened the door for right-wing populists like Donald Trump to cynically claim to represent the marginalized. They rose on the back of crises that are here with us to stay.
A viral tweet decrying the idea of work became a TikTok meme celebrating individualist influencer culture and the lives of the idle rich. But real freedom from the drudgery of labor requires collective action — and building a world beyond capitalism.
It’s fashionable to say that black veterans got no real benefits from the GI Bill. In truth, for many, the GI Bill was a rare positive experience with government that contrasted sharply with the indignities of Jim Crow.
If you’re a Palestinian in the US speaking out for Palestinian rights, you can expect to be censored and slandered. This isn’t just an affront to free speech — it’s often a manifestation of anti-Palestinian racism.
Steven Knight’s new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations adds drug addiction, the slave trade and even sadomasochistic sex. But lurid flourishes alone can’t save this adaptation.
Helen Keller forged her political ideas in the golden age of American socialism and was patronizingly dismissed by conservative commentators who had previously celebrated her. Keller’s passionate radicalism should be remembered and reclaimed by the Left today.
Elite international universities have announced plans to open campuses in India. Yet Narendra Modi’s government has made it clear these won’t be oases of academic freedom — rather, they’ll help Hindu nationalists impose censorship even outside India’s borders.
In her budget proposal this year, New York governor Kathy Hochul is proposing to raise the limit on the number of charter schools in the state. It would worsen the disaster for public education that the charter movement has already caused.
When asked about America’s gun violence and mass shooting epidemic after the recent horror in Nashville, Republican congressman Tim Burchett said the most honest thing a Republican has said in years: “We’re not going to fix it.”
Donald Trump deserves to be indicted and prosecuted. But his legal troubles may not end his political career, much less stop the rise of the broader Trump-inflected right. We’ll only defeat Trumpism by building an attractive political alternative.
Despite the ravages of deindustrialization, the United Auto Workers remain the US’s most important industrial union. Members recently elected a new leadership promising democracy, militancy, and an end to corruption. But change isn’t coming easy to the UAW.
After years of moralizing rhetoric, Keir Starmer couldn’t find a single credible accusation of misconduct to block his predecessor from running as a Labour candidate. All that’s left is a shrill campaign to exclude socialist ideas from public life.
Poet Langston Hughes was invited to speak at Occidental College on this day in 1948, then uninvited when red-baiters released a report calling him a “subversive.” His story shows how the postwar Red Scare targeted radicals, particularly black leftists.
The specter of war in the Asia-Pacific is leading to a gloomy cynicism. But the Australian working class has influenced debates on war before — and won peaceful outcomes.
Last month, a federal US court found a former Mexican security chief guilty of colluding with the Sinaloa Cartel. The trial showed how both the US government and its Mexican clients have been guilty of the criminal activity they’re supposedly trying to stop.
Bernie Sanders’s grilling of Starbucks’s union-busting billionaire Howard Schultz put a CEO in the hot seat on a national stage. It also forced Senate Democrats who might rather stay on the Democratic donor’s good side to denounce his flagrantly illegal behavior.