Opal Lee is a writer.
Twenty years ago, Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball became a huge hit, telling the story of how data-driven analytics produced a winning baseball team. But it also prefigured a broader trend in sports fandom, blemished by gambling and financial speculation.
President Biden keeps touting improved economic indicators that don’t necessarily reflect the conditions of working people. Rather, data reveals an ongoing humanitarian crisis — one that Democrats were complicit in making, but so far refuse to acknowledge.
One of the leading lights of national conservatism, Yoram Hazony, devotes a chapter of his new book to the “Marxist challenge.” But like so many other conservatives, he seems to think Marxism means “anything conservatives find frightening.”
A cabinet minister recently spoke of “two Micks” leading the strike wave in Britain, in a seeming dig against their Irish heritage. But the Irish diaspora’s role in the labor movement is very real, in a country that long relied on its neighbor for cheap labor.
Rich countries are gradually cutting carbon emissions — but that won’t be nearly enough to stop climate disasters, like the heat wave now ravaging the planet. We need drastic, state-led action to rapidly decarbonize our economies.
Under capitalism, the formal equality guaranteed under the law is a farce. Democratic socialism can guarantee liberal rights like free speech while shattering the resource imbalances of capitalism.
In New York State, nonprofits complicit in Israel’s illegal settlements rake in tens of millions of dollars in tax-exempt donations per year. Socialist lawmakers are fighting to change that — and loosen the Israel lobby’s stranglehold on US politics.
Making the leap from four-paneled comic to animated series, Nathan W. Pyle’s Apple TV+ show Strange Planet drowns its unique and subtle charms with far too much plot, character, and story. It’s unfortunately boring as hell.
Almost 30 years ago, The Bell Curve claimed to show a causal connection between genetics and inequality. It further discredited the field among many on the Left, but a proper understanding of genetics actually reveals the social causes of inequality.
Pro-war hawks love to claim that the US military is “the greatest fighting force” in human history. It’s certainly exceptional in two ways: its obscene budget, and its ability to keep its record of death and destruction nearly invisible to the US public.
A new analysis shows that the End Child Poverty Act, reintroduced in Congress by Rashida Tlaib earlier this year, would drastically reduce child poverty and poverty in general and lower income inequality. Supporting it should be a no-brainer for Democrats.
After World War I, Bulgaria had one of Europe’s strongest peasant and worker movements. Within a decade, the Bulgarian left was in shambles, crushed by a brutal military coup and led by the Comintern into an honorable but ill-conceived uprising.
Railways that once offered quick routes through Yugoslavia are today slowed by old rolling stock and new border controls. Their frayed infrastructure reflects the collapse of Tito’s internationalist vision, and the capitalist Wild West that followed.
During the late 1960s, two leftist Argentine filmmakers wrote a manifesto that called for a new type of filmmaking known as “Third Cinema.” This movement led to the creation of some of the most radical and anti-colonial films in the history of cinema.
Last month, the Israeli Knesset passed a measure severely limiting the Supreme Court’s powers. The central motivation: ensuring the courts won’t be able to interfere with plans to vastly increase the number of Israeli squatter settlements on Palestinian land.
Joe Biden’s policy toward Iran has been marked by incoherence and inconsistency. His prisoner swap deal between the United States and Iran is a rare positive development amid escalating tensions.
The contrarian website Spiked is now at the heart of an influential right-wing network in British politics and media. But the group behind Spiked started off as an avowedly Marxist organization before turning its back on left-wing politics in the 1990s.
G20 leaders have announced a deal with Zambia as a new debt crisis looms in the Global South. The deal will be another bonanza for finance capital at the expense of the world’s poorest people unless private lenders are forced to take a loss.
Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed through the first of his controversial judicial reforms. His domestic critics have spent months calling for a last stand for Israeli democracy — but refuse to take up the demands of Palestinians subject to decades of apartheid.
The UFC spinoff company Power Slap is angling to make slap fighting a new “sport.” But its recent visibility has less to do with its organic popularity than with the UFC’s ever-expanding grip on combat sports.