Benjamin Case is a researcher, educator, and organizer living in Pittsburgh.
German artist Max Beckmann is often regarded as interwar Germany’s foremost apostle of despair. Yet while he emphasized his own apolitical character, his work was also the product of a spiritual foreboding that never escaped politics.
Historian Steve Fraser looks back on the strange experience in 1969 when he and fellow New Leftists were accused of plotting to blow up Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell.
The new documentary WTO/99 reconstructs the 1999 protests against a global neoliberal trade order, the violent police repression, and the hope for a different world that found vibrant expression on the streets of Seattle.
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani is trying to demonstrate that the public sector can match or even surpass the private sector in excellence. It’s high time the Left reclaimed the value of “efficiency” from right-wing forces of privatization and austerity.
Platform companies haven’t overthrown Nordic labor institutions. But they have navigated around them, growing by exploiting the Nordic model’s uneven and conditional protections.
Rust Belt cities like Cleveland face a much more hostile landscape for passing pro-worker policies than major cities like New York. But a range of policy options is available to legislators who want to take advantage of them.
Sixty years ago, delegates from all over the world gathered in Havana for the Tricontinental Conference, forging ties of solidarity and resistance. The anniversary came last month, just as the US stepped up its aggressive campaign against Cuba.
In spite of the Gaza genocide, Israel still has plenty of customers for its high-tech exports, especially the weapons it produces. But it is experiencing a debilitating brain drain as secular, highly educated Israelis are emigrating in growing numbers.
When Survivor debuted in 2000, its appeal stemmed from the tension of clashing values, with some contestants taking a nakedly transactional approach and others appealing to the common good. In recent years, market logics have won.
Civilizationalism, the idea that world politics revolves around culturally bounded civilizations led by great powers, is energizing the Right on both sides of the Atlantic. It is key to the effort to dismantle universalism and remake the international order.
Yoon Suk-yeol, the disgraced conservative president who tried to mount a coup against South Korea’s democracy in December 2024, has received a life sentence in prison. The popular resistance to Yoon shows the way for other countries facing authoritarian threats.
Alberta’s sovereigntists are flirting with the Trump administration while promising freedom from Ottawa. But independence would expose the province’s narrow oil economy to capital flight, brain drain, and serious fiscal strain.
Emerging in the 1960s, power structure research — mapping who holds power in society, how those entities are connected, and how they use their resources to shape major decisions — has been an important weapon in civil rights, antiwar, and labor struggles.
While streaming on Amazon is a little on the nose, the Fallout television series admirably embraces the anti-capitalist critique of the original video game franchise. Its apocalyptic alternate America feels less far-fetched every day.
Prediction market cheerleaders want us to put our money up, invoking the wisdom of crowds to justify betting on everything from sports to elections. But the probabilities are shaped by speculation and market design, not reliable forecasts.
State lawmakers across the US have moved to shield residents from sky-high interest rates charged by out-of-state banks. Two GOP congressmen, both heavily financed by Wall Street, are pushing federal legislation to override those state protections.
After trying to bargain a first contract for over a year, the union for 1,000 full-time contingent faculty at New York University is voting on authorizing a strike. Contract faculty say NYU is refusing to budge on pay raises and job security protections.
Today would have been the birthday of the late, great footballer Sócrates, who challenged the military dictatorship in his native Brazil — an example needed today on the eve of a World Cup designed to be a Trumpian propaganda showcase.
Iranians have been trying to complete their democratic revolution for over a century. Every time the US gets involved, it sets that project back by decades.
After a militant 1970 hospital takeover birthed a pioneering detox program in the South Bronx, New York City is now studying what it dismantled, and what redress requires amid an ongoing overdose crisis.