Publication
On November 17, the United Nations Security Council voted for a brazenly colonial plan for Gaza. The vote crystallized a truth long evident to much of the Global South: the multilateral system, dominated by Western power, cannot restrain Western-backed impunity. For the past year, the Hague Group has begun to chart another path — one […]
Few examples illustrate the political polarization of our society more clearly than the clash between feminists and incels. Many feminists view incels as misogynistic men angry about declining male privilege rather than as genuinely vulnerable, while incels depict feminists as manipulative “femoids” who control culture, politics, and social institutions while simultaneously claiming victimhood. On the […]
By 5:30 p.m. on December 1, the December sun had already set when Jake Ephros stopped by his campaign office in Jersey City’s Ward D to pick up a new voter contact list. With about twelve hours to go before polls opened in the city council runoff, Ephros was knocking on as many doors as […]
According to private and federal lawsuits, the country’s biggest meat processors have been using a secretive data company to share sensitive information, enabling them to hike up prices and suppress wages for decades. The revelation comes as meat prices have increased precipitously. Since 1985, the price of ground beef has increased by over 400 percent, far outpacing […]
Last Friday afternoon, Netflix announced they had delivered the winning bid for the 102-year-old studio, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD). Comcast and Paramount Skydance were both in the mix, with the latter now attempting a hostile takeover. Both Paramount, a legacy studio founded in 1912, and Netflix, the world’s largest streamer, have reason to believe that […]
On the night of his election victory on July 7, 2019, new prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis declared that Greece was “returning to normal.” Leader of the right-wing New Democracy party, Mitsotakis promised a government of the “best and brightest” and drew a line under the previous four years of Syriza rule, vowing to erase its […]
In late November, I argued that “way too much leftist discourse is polarized into denunciations vs. defenses of Zohran [Mamdani]. A more useful & important debate is how to organize enough New Yorkers to win Zohran’s agenda — and to counteract the inevitable pressures on him from capital and the political establishment.” Others disagreed. A […]
The third installment of the Knives Out films, Wake Up Dead Man, is now in theaters. But don’t feel bad if you didn’t notice. It’s an extremely limited release in just a tiny handful of theaters before it starts its Netflix run tomorrow on December 12. It’s not an ideal arrangement for a movie with […]
In 2015, an Emirati businessman emailed Jeffrey Epstein asking the financier to put him in touch with Elon Musk, according to leaked emails reviewed by the Lever. According to the records, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, CEO of Middle East logistics giant DP World and one of President Donald Trump’s early Middle Eastern business partners, […]
The independent watchdog for the country’s largest power grid operator has issued a “regulatory grenade” asking the federal government to intervene amid PJM Interconnection’s plans to power data centers it knows it doesn’t have the capacity for — despite acknowledging the heightened risk of blackouts. This comes as PJM has seen windfall profits from shouldering […]
The stock market is, plainly, no longer simply a concern of the elite. “We like to joke that the markets are not the economy,” Peter Atwater of Financial Insyghts recently told Bloomberg, “but we’ve reached a point now where the economy is the markets.” In past articles, I’ve covered the rise and risks of retail […]
Since Donald Trump announced a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, Israeli forces have killed hundreds of Palestinians while continuing to occupy much of Gaza. Despite the ongoing violence and repression in both Gaza and the West Bank, Western states clearly want to move on and act as if the atrocities of the past two […]
American democracy seems to be falling into an ever-greater crisis, with public approval of our political institutions continuing to fall as Donald Trump’s presidency becomes more and more authoritarian. Behind it all, both the Democratic and Republican Parties continue to be dominated by the interests of large, wealthy donors. Some of the United States’ political […]
Jay Kelly is the latest from director and Barbie cowriter Noah Baumbach currently streaming on Netflix after a very limited theatrical release — just enough to be Academy Award eligible of course. The movie opens with a Sylvia Plath quote revealed through smoke in order to emphasize its ephemeral quality: “It’s a hell of a […]
The prime directive of contemporary technology companies is simple: if you can do it, you should do it. A corollary follows: if you can make a profit from it, you must try. Any consequences, damages, or negative externalities are secondary concerns, if they are concerns at all. The rise of “prediction markets,” and their creep […]
Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected future mayor of New York City, is a much-needed breath of fresh air. For decades now, Democrats have focused increasingly on identitarian appeals while offering few real solutions to an economy that puts basic needs like housing out of reach for millions. At best, this has left established power structures […]
Earlier this year, Amazon announced the deployment of its one-millionth robot. Although the company stresses in all of its communications that robots “work alongside our employees,” augmenting and making human labor easier rather than displacing it (they even call their robots “cobots”), the business press clearly saw the implications. “Amazon Is on the Cusp of […]
In March 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower was settling back into the Oval Office from a weeklong vacation at the luxurious Palm Springs ranch of California businessman Paul Helms when the rogue antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy caught his attention. In frustration, the Republican president penned Helms a letter expressing his misgivings with McCarthy’s escalating anti-communist […]
As the world’s seventh largest economy, poised between Western and Eastern power blocs, Brazil is at the forefront of contemporary debates on geopolitics, development, and the green transition. Its political landscape remains dominated by the clash between the left-pragmatism of the ruling Workers’ Party (PT) and the right-populism of bolsonarismo: the former attempting to establish a […]
In June 1951, British novelist Graham Greene was cruising round the Mediterranean in a luxury yacht, the guest of movie producer Alexander Korda. By mid-month they had reached Greek waters. “Last night we spent in Epidaurus Bay & went up to the Greek theatre for a concert,” Greene wrote to his American lover Catherine Walston. […]
The “professional-managerial class” (PMC) has become a staple of political debate on the Left. In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber explains why the PMC is better understood as a heterogeneous layer within capitalism rather than a distinct class, how and why the middle strata have expanded, and what has pushed so many professionals […]
Although the “liberation day” measures of April 2024 were hardly a surprise, they still prompted a global stock market crash and volatility on the US bond market. They also exposed a rift among Donald Trump’s entourage. The tech tycoon Elon Musk, a short-lived addition to Trumpism’s libertarian wing, derided trade czar Peter Navarro as being […]
Just over a year into Keir Starmer’s premiership, things are not looking well for the former human rights lawyer. His term so far has been characterized by scandals around lobbying and by the rise of the far right both electorally and on the streets, not to mention spending cuts that many of his backbenchers opposed […]
The Trump administration recently removed a major roadblock for chemical recycling, an unproven set of technologies that the oil and plastic industries are pitching as a panacea to the world’s plastic pollution crisis. Now, amid an unprecedented lobbying push and with corporate allies ensconced in key regulatory agencies, the industries are clamoring for a nationwide […]
A report from MIT says that the overwhelming majority of generative artificial intelligence implementations are failing — 95 percent of them, in fact. That’s a lot of failure. For a series of technologies touted as the answer to every question ever asked, literally and figuratively, the incapacity of companies to effectively integrate AI into their […]
“When we return from the summer break, there’ll be a clash between reality and ideology.” Thus insisted French prime minister François Bayrou at yet another press conference to defend his austerity budget, which promises an extra €44 billion in spending cuts. Bayrou here echoed the usual neoliberal refrain: public debt is an absolute evil, and […]
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, continues to insist that without full recognition of the rights of Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine, no peace is possible. “Our goal was, and remains, to protect the Russian people who have lived on this land for centuries,” he told an interviewer on August 19. Meanwhile, Russia bombs the very […]
Ticketmaster, the ticketing company accused of illegally monopolizing the live entertainment industry, recently inserted language into its user agreements that steers customer lawsuits into a corporate-friendly private justice system, just months after a federal judge ruled the corporation’s use of such arbitration processes violated federal law. Owned by the parent company Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster quietly announced the […]
From the beginning of the Israeli response to Operation al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, it was clear that the Zionist state had launched a war deadlier and more destructive than all its previous wars. This was the result of the interaction between the most extremist government in the history of that state and the […]
On July 16, the US Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, announced that a third-country deportation flight had landed in Eswatini, a small kingdom in southern Africa. The flight contained five men, allegedly from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Cuba, and Yemen, who she labeled as “barbaric” and “depraved monsters.” McLaughlin posted […]
Two and a half years ago, thousands of workers at one of Amazon’s giant warehouses, known as JFK8, voted to unionize. Their victory generated huge amounts of attention across the country, and suddenly, one of the leaders of the organizing drive, Chris Smalls, was everywhere. Smalls became an overnight celebrity, and he even met with […]
In August, over five hundred people were arrested at demonstrations opposing the British government’s recent decision to list direct-action group Palestine Action as a “terrorist organization.” Peaceful protesters mostly aged in their sixties and seventies were dragged away from the square in front of the Houses of Parliament for the alleged crime of holding placards […]
Every day, when I get home from work I feel so frustrated, the boss is a jerk, And I get my sticks and go out to the shed, And I pound on that drum like it was the boss’s head.“Bang the Drum All Day” by Todd Rundgren (aka the Green Bay Packers touchdown song) Each […]
Jakarta is burning. So are Makassar, Bandung, Surabaya, Mataram, and other cities throughout Indonesia. Discontent that started as outrage over the lavish perks of lawmakers evolved swiftly into a searing indictment of police brutality, elite privilege, economic precarity, wealth disparities, and democratic erosion. The horrific death of a young man named Affan Kurniawan at the […]
Last month’s Air Canada flight attendants’ strike brought the country’s largest airline to a halt with picket lines set up at airports across the country. After the federal government attempted to send the attendants, represented by Canadian Union of Public Employees’ (CUPE) Air Canada Component, back to their jobs, the workers refused, becoming the first […]
The father of California’s past redistricting reforms has come out against California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) proposal to redraw the state’s congressional districts, writing in a New York Times op-ed that he’s opposing the legislative response to President Donald Trump’s nationwide gerrymandering crusade so that he can give “the people an informed choice” and “preserve […]
Since New York City’s mayoral primary in June, the ultrarich have been panicking over how to stop democratic socialist front-runner Zohran Mamdani. Now it seems they have found their answer: a helping hand from Donald Trump. A major problem for Mamdani’s opponents has been that his competitors — incumbent mayor Eric Adams, former governor Andrew […]
For two decades after its evolution from East Germany’s PDS, Die Linke (the Left) has weathered repeated crises. These have included the shrinking of its strongholds in the east and bitter splits, including most recently Sahra Wagenknecht’s 2023 breakaway. Yet, in 2025, it staged a comeback, winning new voters and reclaiming Bundestag seats. At the […]
We’re in a critical moment for the labor movement to build resistance against authoritarianism. For the medium term, three foundations can guide our work: building as broad a front as possible against authoritarianism; organizing a leading sector within that front that advances a proactive vision for multiracial democracy while explicitly opposing neoliberalism; and engaging millions […]
It has not been a very good year for the American coal industry, as both exports and price per ton continue to trend downward, but it’s been even worse for the coal miners themselves. Last week, the Trump administration approved yet another delay in the implementation of a Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) rule […]