The dominant narrative about the “Millennial” generation (roughly, those born between 1980 and 2000) portrays its members as selfish, lazy, narcissistic, entitled, and politically disengaged. Yet in 2008 Barack Obama captured their imaginations: 66 percent of voters under thirty cast …
Denial and indifference are two of the main congressional responses to the inequality, economic stagnation, and climate change that threaten America. But progressives can take heart in the creative, often inspiring initiatives flourishing in patches across the country. States and …
On clear days, you can see dozens of ships from Chile’s artisanal fleet fishing the cool waters of the country’s southern coast, their nets extended across rings of yellow buoys. It can take a half-dozen nets full of fish to …
Recovery from the economic crisis is not enough. We need to do more than just recreate the conditions that led to the crash. This special section seeks to provide a progressive answer to the question of how we should respond to stagnation.
Until recently, the city of Skopje in the former Yugoslavia was known, among those interested in urban development, largely for a single event: the 1963 earthquake that all but leveled the city. But today, under a nationalist government seeking to …
Contemporary American leftists do not, as a rule, think kindly about the history of the nation they inhabit. Centuries of slavery, the bloody conquest of Indian and Mexican lands, and two long imperial wars in East Asia sullied, if not …
Making Capitalism Fit for Society by Colin Crouch Polity Press, 2013, 216 pp. Europe is going through its most difficult period since the Great Depression and the Second World War. Growth rates for the Eurozone overall have been flat this …
As Margaret Gray chronicles in her remarkable new book, Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic, the small- and medium-sized family farms that the food movement has championed are often sites of appalling labor abuses.
There is nothing novel about the impact of technology on labor markets. So why do so many pundits insist on blaming computers and robots for today’s inequality?
Karl Polanyi, whose ideas took form in 1920s Vienna in direct opposition to the free-market orthodoxy of Ludwig von Mises, has gained belated recognition as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His central argument, contra von Mises, is that a self-regulating economic system is a completely imaginary construction, impossible to achieve or maintain.
Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, in many ways, is about men talking and making art, and about the ways that women experience men’s art, or become the object of it.
In the castle-like San Francisco Armory, the Internet porn production company Kink.com hosts live-streamed sex parties where unpaid “guests” are invited to perform S&M scenes for the camera. What happens when performances that once commanded a fee are done for free—and even the producers regard them not as work, but as sexual expression?
Not so long ago, the social contract between workers, government, and employers made college a calculable bet. We built a university system for the way we worked. What happens to college when that social contract is broken—when we work not just differently but for less? And what if the crisis in higher education is related to the broader failures that have left so many workers struggling?
At first glance the runways of New York and the factories of Bangladesh couldn’t seem farther apart. But they are part of the same $1.5 trillion industry, where the work is overwhelmingly performed by young women and girls. Can a new wave of organizing, from the sweatshop floor to the offices of Condé Nast, turn that industry around?
“In sub-Saharan Africa,” a video at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show announces, “there is war that feeds off of global demand for electronics. The place is the DRC—the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The region is ground zero for conflict minerals.” Tech giants including Intel and Apple are now working with NGOs to clean up their supply chains and help promote peace in the region. But will their proposed solutions challenge the deeper patterns of exploitation plaguing the DRC?
