Tanner Howard is a freelance journalist and In These Times editorial intern. They’re also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The music critic Ian Penman made his name during the heady days of anti-Thatcher counterculture. In Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, he finds his match in the frenzied life and work of postwar Germany’s most iconoclastic director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
In the new series White House Plumbers, a brilliant send-up of the Watergate scandal, Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux star as Richard Nixon’s bumbling covert operators. It’s approaching a Coen brothers level of satiric genius.
Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has abandoned his own stated principles and changed his position on one of America’s most significant regulatory doctrines. Why? A dark money network of conservative billionaires is making his family rich.
With the support of the GMB union, British workers at Amazon’s Coventry fulfilment center have turned a wildcat strike into a fight for a collective bargaining agreement.
Last week Serbia was rocked by two mass shootings. President Aleksandar Vučić has responded by announcing a vast expansion of police powers, using “war on terror” rhetoric to ramp up his assault on civil liberties.
If you find yourself having fallen from grace in the public eye because you allegedly committed colossal fraud for years, as Elizabeth Holmes did, fear not: the New York Times is ready to dedicate 5,000 fawning words to you.
In Japan, part-time and temporary workers account for nearly 40% of the workforce but have historically been ignored by the country’s trade unions. This spring, 16 unions came together to demand a collective wage increase for nonregular workers.
Ever since the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party made a breakthrough in Turkish politics, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has tried to hound it out of existence through repression. The party’s supporters could tip the balance against Erdoğan in Sunday’s election.
Sanctions are a form of collective punishment. Their costs are overwhelmingly borne by innocent people rather than governments. And they are just another form of war, not an alternative to it. The US’s many sanctions across the world need to end.
Supreme Court justices often change their ideological position over time, usually becoming more liberal in their rulings as they age. The goal of right-wing billionaires and activists injecting dark money into the court is to prevent this “ideological drift.”
Israeli military zoning in the West Bank sanctions the demolition of Palestinian structures while green-lighting settler farmsteading. As settlements grow, Palestinians are being pushed underground as they are forced to seek shelter in caves.
Right-wing personalities claim that a new elite class is sidelining critics of progressive dogma. Yet such messages are broadcast by all major media: again showing how easy it is to make a grift out of pushing reactionary talking points.
Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh has made a name for himself with his relentless, religious-inflected trans-bashing. He’s a bad thinker and a bad Christian.
For the last year, media pundits have insisted that today’s inflation has nothing to do with corporate profiteering, much to the delight of the capitalist class. It is more than clear now that they were wrong.
Alongside tireless political lobbying, Big Tech has infiltrated the academic institutions studying and often promoting AI — with little regard for the potentially catastrophic downsides.
If the ongoing film and TV writers strike is successful, the Writers Guild of America could establish a model for how service sector, app-based gig workers can take on Silicon Valley.
Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. is probably a nice, worthwhile coming-of-age movie. But it comes off as a bland fantasy film about a land peopled by smiling denizens in sunny dreamscapes who have such mild problems that they aren’t actually problems.
In Turkey’s election, oppositionist Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu hopes to end hard-right president Erdoğan’s two decades in power. But given Kiliçdaroğlu’s inconsistent defense of the Kurdish minority, he offers no catch-all solution to Turkey’s nationalist slide.
This month, Palestinians mark the Nakba, the wave of ethnic cleansing that began their decades of displacement. But in Germany, trumped-up antisemitism allegations are being used to suppress the commemorations — showing that speech isn’t free for all.
Populist grievances are pushing Alberta, Canada’s most conservative province, further to the right. The activist group Take Back Alberta is working to escalate this trend.