John le Carré died Saturday at age eighty-nine. His novels rejected the glamor and ritz of Cold War–era spy fiction. Instead, he portrayed espionage as a dreary, disturbing machine that ground up innocents for a goal that didn’t justify the human cost.
Tens of millions of Americans are struggling to feed themselves, as cases of shoplifting to obtain basic food staples surge worldwide. The pandemic is wreaking economic havoc while Congress dithers.
The first film in Steve McQueen’s new Amazon Prime anthology chronicles the struggle for racial justice in Britain with the 1970s Mangrove Nine trial. It’s a wonderful achievement and valuable popular education on the British struggles against racist policing.
In a major sop to business interests, a Senate proposal would allow corporations to avoid COVID-related lawsuits from workers and patients. Corporate immunity is the last thing we need.
The stimulus bill currently under consideration in Congress does not include direct payments to the millions of workers struggling to survive. That’s an outrage — and, as a further slap in the face, the legislation subsidizes defense contractors.
The renowned physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson died early this year and would have turned ninety-seven today. His eternal and unshakable sense of optimism about the world despite its myriad miseries is desperately needed right now.
Australia’s notoriously cruel border regime once made it a human rights pariah among rich nations. Now, its policies of “pushbacks” and long-term detainment have been adopted in Europe.
US leaders are split between a hard right that would happily sacrifice millions of lives to let businesses keep operating and a liberal center that seems unable to merge the goals of stemming the pandemic and meeting the economic needs of Americans whose livelihoods have been disrupted by it. The truth is, fixing one means fixing the other.
Some right-wing populists are making a bid to outflank the Democrats on industrial policy as part of their attempt to make the Republicans into a “workers’ party.” The best way to defeat them is to make the Green New Deal the centerpiece of progressive twenty-first-century industrial policy.
We always knew mental illness was exacerbated by the stress of economic hardship. But new research confirms that the more a boss is exploiting a worker, the worse it is for that worker's mental health.
Forcing a House floor vote on Medicare for All isn’t a bad idea. But we should prioritize wielding power over engaging in spectacles — and there are several steps progressive lawmakers like AOC can take to substantively shift power toward Medicare for All’s supporters.
PAYGO, which requires legislation to be funded by either tax increases or spending cuts, is one of the worst legacies of Nancy Pelosi’s speakership. It needs to be abolished, along with the disastrous austerity politics that underpins it.