Spring 2025

Toward a Re-framing of Labor’s Argument

Americans have not been constitutionally prone to pessimism. We’re supposed to be pragmatic, ingenious, and inclined to think that hard work and a little luck will fix just about anything. And yet, we are told in myriad ways that we …

Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss’s Hard Work, Dan Clawson’s The Next Upsurge, Steven Henry Lopez’s Reorganizing the Rust Belt, and Rebuilding Labor, edited by Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss

The attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, lit up the global landscape. Not only in these two cities, but wherever the news and the pictures reached during the first hours after the planes struck-all over the …

The West, the East, and Abu Ghraib

Speaking to the Working Class

Republican Strategy to Elect Jeb Bush

I begin with a passage from a 1954 essay of Irving Howe’s, reprinted in the recent Fifty Years of Dissent volume, called, premonitorily enough, “The Problem of U.S. Power”: The central fact [he writes] is that we continue to live …

November 2004: The election is over. The red states have prevailed. And a “values debate” has begun, as has a debate about the debate. Were values really a crucial factor in the Bush majority? And if so, what was at …

An Indian Epic Awry

Sometimes where and when you first read a book matters. In graduate school while I was studying American intellectual history, my adviser, Christopher Lasch, suggested I crack open Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Vital Center. As a young leftist, it …

Agony in Darfur

An examination of the underground economy in Cuba