Abstract: Over the summer of 2026, Britain's governing Labour Party contemplated its own extinction. In the May elections for devolved and local authorities, it suffered near-annihilation in Wales, deepening marginalization in Scotland, and a precipitous loss of council seats across its erstwhile heartlands in Central and Northern England. With the party in disarray, the popular Labour mayor of the Greater Manchester city region, Andy Burnham, spied an opportunity to realize his long-held ambition to take office as prime minister.
Abstract: The United States is approaching midterm elections that will decide whether, and how, we can find a remedy to Trumpism and a path back to functional democracy. The president's popularity continues to erode, and polls suggest that his preferred candidates are vulnerable in key swing states. Despite the gerrymandering of the House, and the in-built gerrymander of the Senate, both are in play. Polls show leads for Democratic candidates in crucial races.
Abstract: When we speak to new workers entering tech, few seem to know about the ferocious activism that spread through the industry a little less than a decade ago. Back then, these battles seemed to be happening everywhere, grabbing headlines in major outlets, week after week, for years on end, from Google and Microsoft employees' fight against military contracts to Amazon workers' open letter against the online retailer's complicity in the climate crisis. According to a recent research paper—co-authored by one of us, JS Tan—such campaigns went from just four cases in 2017 to nearly fifty in 2019, coalescing into something unmistakable: a tech worker movement.
Abstract: My first collective bargaining meeting took place in the laundry room of an apartment building in Williamsburg. After a months-long rent strike, the tenants I had helped to organize finally forced the landlord to recognize their association and to negotiate with them collectively. When the landlord's representatives arrived, they sat squeezed between broken washers and dryers in a basement that had not been properly maintained in years. They were surrounded by precisely the kind of neglect that had driven the tenants to organize in the first place. Over the next several months, the landlord agreed to most of the tenants' demands: building-wide rent reductions, apartment repairs, an end to retaliation against tenant association members, and a formal process for dealing with the tenants' association
Abstract: Everything is a wager these days. Gambling odds are now a ubiquitous feature of sports broadcasts, and prediction markets welcome bets on the timing of U.S. missile strikes. One popular self-help book distilled from conversations with high-flying tech CEOs urges its readers to simply "Bet on Yourself." It's a mantra worthy of Elon Musk, briefly the world's first trillionaire, but surely no one follows this philosophy more than our president, who revels in trusting his own instincts against all naysayers and has defined himself against his predecessors by his voracious appetite for political risk-taking.
Abstract: The 2026 Beijing Auto Show sprawled over two cavernous exhibitions across seventeen halls, featuring 1,451 different cars and attracting well over a million visitors. The displays presented an automotive cornucopia with Chinese characteristics: livestreaming influencers, mini-cars, SUVs with rooftop tents, a cute sedan dressed up as My Little Pony, and too many outrageous flying car concepts. But the array of electric vehicles (EVs) made in automated Chinese factories with attractive prices were the obvious stars of the show. Attendees' genuine excitement to see what was on display was palpable—I was physically elbowed as I entered the event's two-and-a-half-mile perimeter from the north. The show's message was clear: the future has arrived, and it will not replicate the past.
Abstract: "What will it take to get Americans on board with data centers?" a Democratic Party staffer on Capitol Hill recently asked me. It was a sincere question, not a rhetorical one. Data centers have become a flash point in U.S. politics: Americans are sick of them, and organizers are attempting to block their construction, while a cadre of developers, financiers, tech companies, and energy producers push the deals forward, eager to reap the rewards. The failure to scale up these data centers, they claim, is the bottleneck standing in the way of society-changing artificial-intelligence-enabled prosperity.
Abstract: It must have been strange to step outside one morning in Manhattan in the early 1980s and see hordes of young professionals suddenly streaming down the avenues—spic-and-span New Balances bouncing against the concrete, shoulders lofted with padding, Dean & DeLuca bags hanging in the crooks of their elbows. It was "as though the yuppies were waiting in holding pens to be transported en masse to new, ugly, expensive places," Sarah Schulman wrote in The Gentrification of the Mind (2012). I am reminded of a story my mother tells of a very cold morning in SoHo in 1985 or so. Smoking a cigarette outside the shop she was about to open for the day, leaning against the wind, she watched as asphalt was poured over the cobblestones of West Broadway. Without any fanfare, it was done. The city smoothed over in an instant. It's not easy to remember what came before the yuppies, because the city was so swiftly made over in the contours of their desires.
Abstract: Elena's phone vibrates before her alarm at 5:12 a.m. She reaches for it because messages that arrive before dawn tend to matter.
Abstract: In hotel ballrooms across Iowa on the eve of the state's 2020 caucuses, members of the Yang Gang handed out fake $1,000 bills with the face of presidential candidate Andrew Yang and the emblazoned words "FREEDOM DIVIDEND." This funny money was kitsch, but what it represented was, even for those who knew better, a little exciting. Yang's campaign proposed that starting at age eighteen, every U.S. citizen would receive $1,000 a month from the federal government, no strings attached. Technological progress, he insisted, made universal basic income (UBI) necessary. Gone were the dangerous tropes of welfare queens, deadbeat dads, and the undeserving poor; instead, Yang, founder of the nonprofit Venture for America, told his audience to "just Google" a self-driving truck hauling 40,000 pounds of butter across the country. Think of the drivers, motel workers, and chefs at roadside diners all put out of work, he warned. The robots were coming for all of our jobs, so we needed a universalist welfare state.
Abstract: In November 2014, less than a year into his tenure as NBA commissioner, Adam Silver quietly staked his claim to the most consequential position in modern American sports. "Betting on professional sports is currently illegal in most of the United States," he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. "I believe we need a different approach." In 500 words of banal, press-release prose, Silver wrote fondly of England, where bets could be placed on a smartphone or "using a television remote." He spoke optimistically of curbing the illegal betting industry's "shady offshore" operations, which were, according to wildly inflated calculations, netting $400 billion annually. Silver ultimately made the case for bringing sports wagering "out of the underground and into the sunlight." Only then could it be "appropriately monitored and regulated."
ABSTRACT: On September 2, 1945, as the anticolonial struggle spread across French Indochina, Ho Chi Minh presented the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam at a mass meeting in Hanoi. The proclamation opened with a citation of the 1776 American Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
ABSTRACT: Traditionally, anniversaries serve two functions. They allow us to take stock of where we are, and they allow us to celebrate what has been accomplished with the passage of time. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is coming at a low point in the country's complex history, which makes the latter feel out of place. Instead, it seemed better to use the opportunity to consider our current condition and think about how to improve it. Julie C. Suk and David Bateman, professors of law and government, respectively, have written extensively and thought deeply about all the ways that U.S. government institutions are not serving us well. We spoke in April about our undemocratic past, our undemo-cratic present, and our possible democratic future.
ABSTRACT: On a recent drive from Washington, D.C., to western Michigan, I passed by a white semi-trailer in an open field, perpendicular to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Blue handpainted text along the bottom of the trailer read, “USA, God, Prolife, Guns, Coal, Oil, No Socialism,” and above it all, painted in red, was “TRUMP.” I wonder whether Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown passed the same sign as they were writing Rural Versus Urban over the last five years. They traveled thousands of miles across America’s rural counties, analyzing and collecting data spanning roughly five decades and conducting interviews with local Democratic and Republican Party chairs and former elected officials, in order to get beyond the surface anger of improvised roadside billboards. To Mettler and Brown, rural resentment is a symptom of larger developments in the American political system rather than the cause of its latest divisions.
ABSTRACT: As the Trump administration has attacked pillar after pillar of civil society, including unions, two puzzles for the labor movement have grown in importance: Why did so many union members vote for a documented union buster? And what can unions do to sustain member mobilization against that union buster’s increasingly authoritarian regime?
ABSTRACT: Americans learn about public lands in history class, but if you live east of the Mississippi, you probably haven’t thought about them much since. You might know about the Homestead Act, which encouraged westward expansion by allowing settlers to make claims on land and take ownership after five years of residence. You could possibly recall the Taylor Grazing Act or the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act, which together changed the government’s approach from disposal and privatization to holding and management. But unless you’ve recently gone on a Western road trip, you’re unlikely to have noticed that the federal government still owns more than a quarter of the land in this country and that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is the nation’s largest landlord, managing 10 percent of the land in the United States. You likely don’t know that drilling on public lands is responsible for about a quarter of U.S. carbon emissions.
ABSTRACT: Americans tend to imagine that aversion to taxation is deeply rooted in our national political culture. Didn’t the founders rally behind the slogan “no taxation without representation”? Don’t all Americans—even those favoring regulation and a strong social safety net—always prefer lower taxes? Isn’t this why we can’t afford to have nice things?
ABSTRACT: Last summer, the Bronx was burning. In July, as a heatwave smothered the Eastern Seaboard, the temperature in New York City’s poorest borough reached a record-setting 100.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Extreme heat kills over 500 New Yorkers each summer, when crowded, shadeless neighborhoods become furnaces and pressure-cookers. No borough is more vulnerable to heat-related deaths than the Bronx, where residents—85 percent of whom are Black or Hispanic—suffer from higher rates of asthma and diabetes, are more likely to work outdoors, and have less air conditioning access than people living in other boroughs.
ABSTRACT: “Socialism is the name of our desire,” Dissent’s founders stated in 1954. It was an ethical and moral demand, a compass rather than a map. It was a “vision,” they wrote, “that gives urgency to . . . criticism of the human condition in our time.” One purpose for Dissent was to rescue the idea of socialism from those who claimed it for authoritarian ends. And that points to a problem with our vocabulary. Across the globe, a few big concepts define political orientations: liberalism, socialism, capitalism. But each of these categories contains multiple meanings, including internally contradictory ones. There are struggles between ideological camps, of course, but there are also struggles within them over how to define these categories for the public. The ways that people understand the meaning of political words is, alas, derived less from the work of intellectual magazines and more from experiences with politicians who claim them.
Abstract: How should we look back at the history of the “sewer socialists” of Milwaukee? This question has taken on renewed urgency following the elections of Seattle’s Katie Wilson and New York City’s Zohran Mamdani, who has said that “the example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often.” Most historians of the left in the United States have regarded Milwaukee’s three socialist mayors as minor historical figures or neglected them altogether. But attention to the city’s history of socialism increased markedly with the rise of Bernie Sanders, himself a former socialist mayor, and even more so following the decision to hold the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee in August 2020.
