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.
20417 Article(s) by: Ryan Switzer
Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
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.
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.
Jacobin IRL
Over the next week, Jacobin will be hosting events at the Left Forum conference and elsewhere in New York.
The Next Portuguese Revolution
On the Carnation Revolution’s fortieth anniversary, Portugal’s elites want to use its legacy to justify austerity.