
Dean Wareham on Writing Music in a World on Fire
Best known as lead vocalist of Galaxie 500, Dean Wareham has a new solo album. He spoke to Jacobin about what it means for music to be political in times when it’s hard to watch the news.

Best known as lead vocalist of Galaxie 500, Dean Wareham has a new solo album. He spoke to Jacobin about what it means for music to be political in times when it’s hard to watch the news.

In Britain, hotels hosting refugees have become a target of anti-immigration rallies. Keir Starmer’s government is pandering to the protests — announcing a partnership with delivery app firms to identify asylum seekers working as riders.

Donald Trump’s first 100 days have shown what a vigorous use of executive power actually looks like. But aside from permanently hobbling the modern American state, it’s hard to see what he’s actually achieved with it.

Palmer Luckey’s defense company, Anduril, is arming up with AI.

Labor PM Anthony Albanese promised more of the same, with maybe a little bit of tinkering if the budget allows. And thanks to opposition leader Peter Dutton’s abysmal Trump imitation, it won Labor a landslide victory in Saturday's Australian election.

The Trump administration is attacking jobs and wages in the building trades, as well as the rights of immigrant workers. Building trades unions have been divided over whether to try to curry favor with the president or confront the attacks head-on.

The Democrats' Project 2029 takes up the unique strategy of getting the very people who drove their party into the disastrous rut it is now stuck in to come up with the ideas that will get it out.

In the wake of protests over West Bank real estate, Toronto has ring-fenced public space around dozens of synagogues. This expansion of “bubble zones” has less to do with real danger than with political lawfare against critics of Israel.

It’s hard to think of a parallel effort in US history to build a domestic agency of violence specialists at the scale of ICE.

Tony Blair’s capacity for malevolence appears to be without limit. Blair’s latest intervention in British politics is yet another bid to make the world an uglier, nastier place, brought to you in association with his tech billionaire sponsors.

Novelist Nadine Gordimer crossed South Africa’s color line to become a staunch opponent of apartheid and supporter of the ANC. Her fiction tackled the savage inequalities of South African society that have continued beyond the end of minority rule.

Both Donald Trump and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele style themselves successful businessmen with an affinity for social media, cryptocurrency, and criminalizing poor Salvadorans. And each stands to gain from the relationship with the other.

Discontent over dire economic conditions lay behind the protest wave that rocked Iran earlier this month. A US attack will make things even worse for the Iranian people, whether or not it results in the regime change Donald Trump would like to see.

Digital technology was sold as a liberating tool that could free individuals from state power. Yet the state security apparatus always had a different view — and now it’s taking back control of its own creation.

Retirement systems and municipal treasuries hold billions of dollars of investments in companies like Tesla and nations like Israel. That means those funds hold enormous potential leverage over such companies and countries if they can credibly threaten divestment.

Knowledge workers, whose jobs involve handling information rather than producing goods, were supposed to be the beneficiaries of neoliberalism and globalization. But generative AI and a hypercompetitive employment market is immiserating them too.

With Zohran Mamdani now mayor, Diana Moreno’s run for his old assembly seat in Queens tests how durable democratic socialist organizing has become in New York.

ICE is out of control. Democrats have numerous ways to restrain the agency, from barring ICE from domestic spying and terminating its contracts with tech companies to creating and fully funding an independent body to investigate its many abuses.

The National Education Association, the United States’ largest teachers’ union, has voted to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League over the group’s weaponization of antisemitism and attacks on supporters of Palestinian rights.

Pope Francis brought a limited but desperately needed progressive spirit to the Catholic Church. Under his successor, that spirit is likely to wither.