Twenty-five years ago, someone like Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson would have had little to offer the world. His rise to global phenomenon suggests that virality is emptier than even pessimists thought possible.
Donald Trump Is Unpopular. That Only Matters in a Democracy.
US democracy has been degrading for years. Donald Trump has the motive, the disposition, and the political and legal infrastructure to simply circumvent it, especially with such low approval ratings and midterm elections around the corner.
Bummerland Sends Up Austin’s MAGA Tech-Bro Culture
A new essay collection by Randolph Lewis chronicles how Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, an Apple campus, and scorched-earth MAGA capitalism killed Austin’s famous weirdness — and finds unexpected glimmers of hope even in big-box America.
Study How Zohran Mamdani Handles This Heckler
In just a few seconds, Zohran Mamdani takes a fairly sophisticated argument in political theory and translates it into a funny but substantive response to a heckler that redirects the conversation to affordability.
ICE Is Trying to Avoid Oversight by Buying Private Prisons
The Trump administration is considering purchasing a number of private immigrant detention centers across the US. Doing so may allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to bypass state laws geared at curbing abuses in the facilities.
Under capitalism, technological “progress” like AI systematically deskills workers, deepens managerial control, and turns the labor process into a site of conflict rather than liberation. This is by design.
In Denmark, the Center Did Not Hold
Tuesday’s Danish election punished the Social Democrats as well as their center-right government partners. The result again showed voters’ distaste for managerial coalitions spanning the neoliberal center ground.
TSA Is on a Brown-Bag Strike — and Crippling Airports
TSA agents across the country are engaged in guerrilla organizing: an illegal, partial wildcat strike in protest of the government shutdown that has left them working for weeks on end without pay.
Hugh Mulzac’s Journey From Black Nationalism to the New Deal
Pioneering ship captain Hugh Mulzac’s remarkable life story reflects the maturation of black politics in the early 20th century. He began as a black nationalist but soon saw the singular promise of multiracial labor struggle to improve black workers’ lives.
A Top Pentagon AI Gatekeeper Has a Stake in Anthropic’s Rival
One of the Pentagon’s top officials driving the decision to blacklist Anthropic for refusing to allow its algorithms to be used for mass surveillance has a multimillion-dollar stake in one of the company’s competitors.
Neoliberalism didn’t win an intellectual argument — it won power. Vivek Chibber unpacks how employers and political elites in the 1970s and ’80s turned economic turmoil into an opportunity to reshape society on their terms.
Project Hail Mary Is the Feel-Good Dystopian Sci-fi We Need
Ryan Gosling’s new space film, Project Hail Mary, blends doomsday stakes with a surprisingly tender cross‑species friendship, offering a rare blockbuster that admits the planet is worth saving — and that solidarity might still matter.
JROTC Is Preying on Poor Students
A recent string of revelations about abuses by the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps presents an opportunity to rein in the military’s presence and power in public schools.
After France’s Elections, the Left Remains Deeply Divided
France’s local elections again showed Emmanuel Macron’s weakness. With both the Socialists and France Insoumise making gains, neither party will likely recognize the other as the Left’s standard-bearer for the 2027 presidential election.
The Kathy Hochul Donors in the Jeffrey Epstein Files
A look at New York governor Kathy Hochul’s donors and the Jeffrey Epstein files reveals that some of the same billionaires who gave to her campaigns — and would benefit from her refusal to tax the rich — also were connected to the ultrawealthy pedophile.