Issue 57: Letters + The Internet Speaks
Email was invented for this very purpose — [email protected].
Blog
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.
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.