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.
