Growth vs. the Climate
It would be nice to hear it straight for once. Stopping climate change means giving up on growth.
Spring 2025
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Why Feminism Needs Punk
Taking a cue from punk icon Viv Albertine, today’s feminists should dare to want more—and forget about asking for it nicely.
The Presidential Empire
Whichever way Congress might vote on the NSA, the steady creep of our executive branch is unlikely to be reversed.
Postcards from Empire
At the height of colonialism, indentured Indian women in the Caribbean were photographed for a thriving postcard industry. Their images enact a struggle—between the imaginations of colonial-era photographers and the real lives of the women behind the portraits.
Classroom Saints and Fiends
Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars shows that the failed ideas underlying today’s ed-reform crusade are as old as public education itself.
The Long Shadow of Neoconservatism
The great majority of the American political class were complicit in the deceptions that led to the Iraq war—and are desperate for the rest of the country to forget it.
Organizing the Unorganizable
Worker centers have empowered nurses, nannies, busboys, taxi drivers, and many other low-wage immigrants long thought to be “unorganizable.” They provide clues to the future of organized labor—but can their victories scale up?
Liberal Punishment
Naomi Murakawa’s remarkable book The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America shows how, since the 1940s, liberals have provided legitimacy for the prison state.
Is HSBC the World’s Most Honest Bank?
Does your money cross borders as easily as you do? That’s a question that HSBC, “the world’s local bank,” posed to would-be clients in a slogan that appeared on posters around the world a few years ago. The prompt accompanied a photograph of smiling Asian cyclists before the University of Cambridge. “When life takes you or your family across borders, your money should seamlessly follow,” reads the caption. “You’re at home abroad. Now the same can be said for your money.”
The French Dilemma
It is crucial to avoid treating the Charlie Hebdo attacks as shots in a war waged on France.
The Men in the Middle
If there’s an engine that continues to draw millions of workers into the Persian Gulf’s draconian labor regime, it is the middlemen—the underground network of recruitment agents that reaches into every corner of rural South Asia, dangling the possibility of a better life before communities ravaged by neoliberalism.
The Assistant Economy
Welcome to the main artery into creative or elite work—highly pressurized, poorly recompensed, sometimes exhilarating, more often menial. From the confluence of two grand movements in American history—the continued flight of women out of the home and into the workplace, and the rise of the “creative class”—the personal assistant is born.
American Orientalism
From the late nineteenth century to our post-9/11 era, Americans have imagined South Asians simultaneously as exotic and barbaric, magical and menacing—to the detriment of those immigrants who are already most vulnerable.
From the Margins: Introducing Our Spring Issue
Featuring essays by Vivek Bald, Michelle Chen, Anjali Kamat, Mae Ngai, and more, our Spring issue examines the power of borders—real and imagined—and what they look like from the perspective of those they seek to exclude.
Updating Debs’s Dream
Nearly every morning, hundreds of immigrants from Latin America come to my affluent town in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. to work. They build or clean million-dollar houses, cook and wash dishes at fast-food and fancy restaurants, care for the …
