Plenty of contemporary comedy gazes upon American stupidity and concludes that Americans are stupid. The Chapo Trap House anthology Chunks suggests instead that people behave strangely because the world around them has become so strange.
The Caribbean of the 1970s was marked by major political and social upheaval. Cricket became a primary vehicle for asserting West Indian independence — and defeating England was paramount.
The primary in France’s Parti Socialiste will not likely pick the winner of the 2027 presidential election. But it will decide whether the party seeks compromise on the Left, or else directs its fire against rival left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Mitchell Abidor, author of Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, responds to his critics.
The Christian right hasn’t always dominated Texas politics. While it claims to represent a deep regional tradition, the state’s modern right-wing evangelicalism is a newer invention — forged in the crucible of elite reaction to populist movements.
The historian Frances Stonor Saunders died recently at age 60. Her book Who Paid the Piper? pulled back the curtain on postwar CIA funding of Western cultural institutions — despite repeated attempts to censor it, including by her American publisher.
Economist Mona Ali on how the United States wields the world’s most powerful currency to shore up empire and its own ruling class — and how Trump’s careless moves might blow it all up.
Social democracy transformed the 20th century, giving working people a share of wealth and power their grandparents could scarcely imagine. But the movement that set out to overcome capitalism ultimately struggled to defend what it had won within it.
Marcus Garvey built the largest black movement of his era on the promise of redeeming Africa. But he knew almost nothing about the continent, and his organization had nothing to offer black workers on the things that shaped their lives.
The Criterion Channel’s Southern Gothic collection gathers a century of films about a region that set out to make its slaveholding past look civilized. Instead, it produced a body of work steeped in rot, delusion, and violent religiosity.
Bernie Sanders and AI whistleblowers warn that the tech poses grave risks to humanity, while many on the Left call this alarm “criti-hype” — an exaggeration of AI’s power that benefits Big Tech. But AI poses real dangers that we can’t afford to ignore.
Instead of fostering a more democratic path to development, Canada and the EU are strengthening alignment through fossil fuels, weapons production, and customary geopolitical maneuvering.