Calling 911 can save lives. But all too often phoning the emergency hotline leads to maiming or death at the hands of the police. Rebecca Neusteter describes the origins of the emergency response syst...

Some of the most important struggles for health justice have taken place in New York City — from the Young Lords to ACT UP, from battles to make school lunches free to the Fight for $15 for low wage w...

We live our lives often through the things we buy — presuming the more we have, the happier we’ll be. Have we always thought this way? Economist Mark Joseph Stelzner examines the need for ever more co...

Almost 98% of all state executions in the U.S. are conducted by lethal injection, ostensibly a quick and painless death. Corinna Barrett Lain states nothing could be further from the truth — but that ...

Why do poor, often sick, rural people vote for Republicans even after they slash funding for Medicaid and close rural hospitals? Michael Shepherd describes how conservative politicians and media have ...

When we think of world makers, we’re unlikely to picture a flower. Yet flowers completely transformed our planet, giving us rain forests, altering coastlines, producing the food we eat, and enticing o...

Jessica Mitford revived muckraking journalism in the United States, shaping generations of investigative writers who followed her. She also lived a committed life on the left, despite her ultra-reacti...

Big Tech’s owners see themselves as visionaries — as singularly capable of understanding and shaping the future — in contrast to the rest of us. Adrian Daub explores the worldview of Silicon Valley’s ...

After a century of drug prohibition, during which the use of many illicit drugs increased, states and countries are moving to decriminalize the usage of certain psychoactive substances. Legal scholar ...

Capitalism has transformed the world like no other force, which historian Sven Beckert calls a fundamental break in human history. Beckert traces the emergence and expansion of capitalism, arguing tha...

The Trump administration has justified the mass incarceration and deportation of immigrants by asserting that it’s going after the most violent offenders. Scholars of law and punishment, Keramet Reite...

For as long as we’ve known, humans have revered ancient trees. We’ve also destroyed them, especially since the advent of colonialism and fossil fuel capitalism. Environmental historian Jared Farmer re...

We all know that we need money to survive, but most of us don’t spend much time considering its form and uses. Debt, interest, GDP, and capital just seem to follow almost natural laws. But J.W. Mason ...

What can the weird tell us about our world of computer vision and so-called Artificial Intelligence? Artist and geographer Trevor Paglen discusses the function of the image now, when the majority of i...

Workers want and deserve decent, dignified, and democratic workplaces. But better wages and working conditions can be elusive in the face of management inertia and intransigence. Veteran organizer and...

As mega-fires rage around the world, why have so many people given up on the climate fight? Environmental sociologist Diana Stuart examines how fatalism about addressing the climate emergency has been...

The United States spends as much on healthcare as almost half the world combined, yet so many Americans are unhealthy. Would universal healthcare be enough alone to rectify this costly state of ill he...

It’s often argued that culture is the gateway to politics — that if you can influence cultural values, it will ultimately change society as whole. In the late Sixties, the counterculture was animated ...

Imagine, as a journalist or activist, trying to access your bank accounts and mysteriously finding them frozen. Debanking — when financial institutions close the accounts of those flagged as problemat...

Americans as a population have an unusually large appetite for psychoactive drugs, whether legal or illegal. And American history has been marked by periodic moral panics over drug use and normalizati...

Fossil fuel combustion has made dangerous heat waves ever more frequent. The short term answer — for those who have it — is to turn on the air conditioner. But air conditioning makes the the problem e...

Prisons won’t be dismantled anytime soon. So what does—or should—prison abolition mean? Anna Terwiel draws from Angela Davis’s writings a host of insights that buttress what Terwiel considers a realis...

One of conservation’s greatest achievements happened mostly by accident and is still hiding in plain sight from most of us. When settlers established cities in the United States, they decimated the ex...

How did conservatives come to dominate so much of the media in the U.S.? Historian A.J. Bauer looks at the formative period between the advent and repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in which the right lo...

For many decades, the idea has held sway that we humans should leave consequential decisions to a higher power: computers. And that assumption has become more deeply entrenched, the more powerful comp...

The backlash against trans people, which has swept both the United States and the world in recent years, is not as new as it seems, according to historian Jules Gill-Peterson. She traces the emergence...

The rise and fall of unemployment, our dependence on the market for our livelihoods — such things are taken as a given. But economist Clara Mattei suggests we need to recognize them as being fundament...

It’s been called a new gold rush, yet not of our external environment, but of our internal environment — of our minds and psyches. Historian of science D. Graham Burnett, one of the Friends of Attenti...

The Texas Republican Party has evolved from a corporate libertarian institution to one in which free market capitalism and evangelical Christianity are united in authoritarianism. Political scientist ...

Scholar Emmaia Gelman reflects on the Anti-Defamation League’s long history of targeting the left in the United States and abroad. She describes the purported civil right group’s involvement in the Re...

The Trump administration has exposed the enormous power, as well as astounding wealth, of the billionaire class. And the power of that class partially emanates from their ownership of much of our medi...

The revelations of widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency after 9/11 brought to light one aspect of how the government has capitalized on digital technology to amass power – and such dangers have only multiplied. Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has been involved in numerous groundbreaking legal battles with the … Continued

The revelations of widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency after 9/11 brought to light one aspect of how the government has capitalized on digital technology to amass power – and such ...

In the 1980s, yuppies were celebrated in the media and reviled by many others. Working in finance or as management consultants or lawyers, they quickly put their stamp on cities around the country, di...

Are women as strong as men? According to science writer Starre Vartan, in some cases, they are stronger. She argues that scientific research over the last several decades shows that culture shapes str...

Over the past four centuries, owners have sought to wrest control of the labor process away from the workers in plantations, factories, and warehouse. Ideas about labor management, dressed up as a sci...

The Republican Party has traditionally been the party of the business class. But since the era of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, the GOP has been marked by internal strife and ideological chaos — and in ...

We inhabit a world in which what we look at — what we see, read, scroll through — has often supplanted what we hear. The visual has replaced sound. But, of course, sounds are everywhere, both human-ma...

Recessions, trade wars, labor unrest — in moments of societal crisis in the United States, Asian-Americans have been perennially targeted, from the destruction of Chinatowns by white mobs, to the mass...

Sugar may seem like a natural, almost eternal substance, cultivated over thousands of years. But it was remade by capitalism and turned into a homogenized commodity. Enslaved labor was central to suga...

Fiction that imagines alternate futures is often associated with the left — with writers like Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin. But the tropes of science fiction are well-suited to the right and, as J...

Jews and the left have been closely associated with each other for well over a century, both in Europe where the Nazis genocidally linked one with the other, and in the United States. Scholar Benjamin...

The power the police wield on the streets of this country is plain to see. Less visible, but no less formidable, is the immense political power and influence that the police exercise. Historian Stuart...

The left has a long history of predicting the decline of US capitalism and empire. Some argue that Trump is a symptom of that decline — a strongman chosen by capital to set things right — and that the...

We often are told there is no other way to organize society — that by our very nature, we’re destined to try to dominate each other. But are such assumptions merited? Primatologist Agustin Fuentes pul...

It’s widely recognized that vast amounts of wealth are now concentrated in the hands of the very few. But less well understood, scholar Ray Madoff argues, is how the U.S. tax code played a key role in...

Trump has not only threatened Iran’s civilian infrastructure, but the U.S. and Israel have systematically targeted it since the start of their attack. Historian Golnar Nikpour reflects on the human co...