In an era when power is increasingly defined by digital infrastructure and platform dominance, USAID was already losing relevance to the high-tech actors shaping US foreign influence, even before the recent attacks by the Trump administration.
Indonesia’s right-wing president Prabowo was elected with a commanding share of the youth vote in 2024. This year, a new youth protest movement is challenging Prabowo’s spending cuts and the role of the military in Indonesian politics.
The 2020 rupture of a carbon dioxide pipeline in a Mississippi village that poisoned dozens of people inspired a slate of new safety regulations, proposed in the last week of Joe Biden’s presidency. Donald Trump has withdrawn the proposed rules.
In his new book, Believe, Ross Douthat contends that religious faith provides necessary social cohesion and personal meaning. But can a broad appeal to belief survive in an era of increasingly sectarian and politicized faith?
The memes celebrating Luigi Mangione are far from novel: they represent a long tradition of American popular culture voicing outrage at the injustices of our health care system, from Dog Day Afternoon to Star Trek: Voyager to John Q.
Rural postal workers don’t just deliver mail. They put out fires, help elderly people who’ve fallen, and ensure veterans receive medication during storms. Trump’s proposed USPS privatization threatens these care networks in areas already lacking services.
In the decades after 1945, European leftists disillusioned with workers’ parties created new protest movements and countercultures. Their efforts were boundlessly creative — but also reflected an erosion of the mass politics that had sustained the old left.
The Trump administration wages a ruthless war on “wokeness” when it means gutting social programs. But when it means suing a predatory firm that acts woke while ripping working-class Americans off, Trump suddenly loses interest.
In Poland, postwar Communist rule has few defenders. But state-subsidized eateries known as milk bars, designed under state socialism to free people from “kitchen slavery,” continue to thrive today.
Karl Marx saw how presidential systems with strong executives threatened to eclipse the democratic power of the legislature.
Saudi Arabia’s plan to start its own international basketball league is the latest sign of the game’s drift into a world in which money, held by increasingly anonymous elites, has distanced sport from fans and communities.
The QAnon conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was fighting a satanic pedophile cabal may have faded from national discourse, but its ideology, networks, and practices have become integrated into American politics.