Some liberals have signed on to a worrying number of anti–civil liberties measures in recent years. The Right wants to rebrand as the new champion of freedom. This is absurd: no one is pushing authoritarianism harder than conservatives.
The reaction to a new film about sex workers tells us more about liberal reviewers than the workers themselves.
East Coast boarding schools once prepared “ordinary” boys from the elite for national leadership — helping them forge friendships, networks, and marriages to rule the country.
Director Jean-Luc Godard has died at the age of 91. Many of his films explore the struggles of the post-’68 period — but even his less explicitly political work provides a utopian message of creative freedom.
Supernatural ideas were widespread at the turn of the 20th century, especially in Germany. But in the social crisis following World War I, esoteric and border-science ideas became a powerful tool of Nazi mobilization, directed at demonizing Jews and the Left.
Newspapers are a key part of a healthy press that is vital to any democratic society. But we shouldn’t valorize the corporate media as our last line of defense against Trump or anything else.
In the years after the revolution, Russian designers rethought style. Among them was Varvara Stepanova, who aimed to take fashion out of the realm of luxury and make it accessible to all.
A “flaming abolitionist” of lesser fame, William Goodell was praised by Frederick Douglass for being among the most important opponents of slavery in his time. He articulated a radical moral vision: a political theology of hope grounded in justice and reason.
Legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie is best known for his anthem “This Land Is Your Land,” which can come off as an innocuous ode to America if you aren’t listening closely. But the singer-songwriter was a lifelong socialist.
Donald Sutherland (1935–2024) projected equal parts warmth, intelligence, and menace on the big screen. But he wasn’t just a brilliant actor — he was a man of the Left who never abandoned those values.
During Reconstruction, elites used racist appeals to silence calls for redistribution and worker empowerment.
David Brooks disapproves of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
Forced to support his family as a child star of the 1940s, Dean Stockwell embraced the counterculture of the 1960s while cutting his own path through eight decades in Hollywood.
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. His films — dazzling portraits of Senegalese and French society — represent some of the most brilliant attempts to think about the limits and possibilities of political art.
Over the past two centuries, US imperial interventions have had a devastating impact on the peoples of Latin America. Those interventions have also played a crucial role in US domestic politics, enabling new power blocs to cohere and develop their strategies.
The EpiPen mess shows that we need drugs that function as real social goods, not rent-producing commodities.
Mike Davis on the Trump phenomenon and why young people are so open to socialism.
On June 14, a UPS driver shot three coworkers, then himself. UPS has to answer for its role in pushing its workers to violence.
Throughout her career, Rachel Cusk has been a forensic chronicler of her own middle-class neuroses. Parade, her latest novel, transmutes the brutal self-examination that she perfected in her memoirs into fiction.