Protocols for a Better Magazine

We binged every episode of Huberman Lab. Things are getting weird.

Pinker’s Progress

The progress Steven Pinker identifies is real, but so is the growing gap between what is and what could be.

Progress Report

We explained our issue prompt to ChatGPT and asked it to recommend five books on the idea of progress. The results — which represent the return of an AI author to Jacobin’s pages, after a somewhat clumsy chatbot interview in issue 52 — were more banal than sinister.

A Soundtrack for Progress

For veteran music critic Simon Reynolds, the “avant-lumpen” sound captures how it feels to be alive today with raw voices and synthetic soundscapes.

Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn

Yesterday Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, oversaw the imprisonment of Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu. In jailing his political rival, Erdoğan has joined a global club of authoritarian leaders unwilling to tolerate challengers of any kind.

Welcome to Everytown

The sci-fi film Things to Come debuted just before World War II. It was all too prophetic in its portrait of a society destroyed and then rebuilt by advanced technology.

A Century of Stealing Fire

Veni, Vidi, Vici

How Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s mournful portrait of Rome shaped the Enlightenment’s understanding of progress.

Bellamy and Morris’s Dueling Utopias

How two socialist science-fiction bestsellers invited nineteenth-century readers into a grand debate about progress.

Stop the Music!

A brief catalog of genre-changing moments in music history.

Musk Looks to the Motherland

The billionaire is fueling a global panic about the fate of white South Africans and misrepresenting the real problems that plague his home country.

Mine for the Taking

Niger has the opportunity to nationalize the uranium industry. Will it?

“We Didn’t Have Anywhere to Go”

As Azerbaijan reclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh, its Armenian population faced a devastating choice: flee or risk death.

Greenland Is Not for Sale

The people of Greenland don’t want to be subjects of Denmark or the United States — they want economic independence and freedom from foreign control.

Build, Baby, Build!

Two decades of unprecedented infrastructure investments transformed China. Then the country hit a wall of debt.

Donald Trump in Palestine

The US president ran as an antiwar candidate. Now he wants to use American muscle to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip.

That Hopey, Changey Stuff

Obama’s presidency promised a new era in America, but the failure of his landmark legislation, the Affordable Care Act, set the stage for today’s disillusionment.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost Mourned a Revolution Betrayed

Blind, alone, and reeling from the failures of the English Revolution, Milton wrote an epic reflection on political defeat and the possibility of hope.

Eugenics and the Welfare State

Swedish social democracy’s relationship to eugenics is a reminder that socialist planning requires a bedrock commitment to human dignity.

Turn On, Tune In, Cash Out

In the 1960s, psychedelics seemed to promise social progress. Today their proponents are all about self-optimization under capitalism.