Issue 57: Dossier

You could get invited to an eighteenth-century salon at any time. Be prepared.

Waves of the Future

For the electrosensitive community in Green Bank, West Virginia, the perils of progress haunt our present.

Issue 57: Letters + The Internet Speaks

Email was invented for this very purpose —[email protected].

Stopping Donald Trump’s Anti-Union Offensive

Labor will only survive the Trumpification of America through confrontation.

Hope Springs Eternal

When and where organized labor’s been on the move.

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.