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Repair the Crumbling Infrastructure of the American Labor Movement
A former public affairs aide for the AFL-CIO once told me he spent most of his day fielding queries from conservatives. Most liberals outside the Rust Belt lost interest in organized labor decades ago;...
View ArticleHow Amazon Exploited a Weakened America
During the Covid-19 pandemic, one in four Americans has struggled to pay their bills, and as of mid-January, unemployment claims surpassed those of the Great Recession for the forty-third straight...
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Inside the Last Men’s Hotel in Chicago
When Mike Bush was 12, all knees and soft eyes, he won a scholarship to attend youth classes at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was the summer of 1968, hot and angry and hopeful, and...
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from Field Study
Excerpted from Field Study by Chet’la Sebree, by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
View ArticleThe Farming Lobby’s Cunning Plan to Fight Climate Change—and Regulation
In 1980, the American Farm Bureau Federation, currently the largest agricultural lobbying group and third-largest insurance company in the country, called for the Environmental Protection Agency to be...
View ArticleThe Enduring Fiction of Affordable Housing
In October of 2018, Leslie Hernandez stood in the hallway of her building, an olive-green stucco and concrete complex in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, trying to communicate with her neighbor Benson Lai, an...
View ArticleRight-Wing Pundits’ Pathetic Defenses of Georgia’s Voter-Suppression Law
Laura Ingraham’s monologue on Thursday evening was all about canceling the myriad corporations—including Delta and Coca Cola—who have come out against the restrictive new voting bill signed into law in...
View ArticleHow a Bunch of Revolutionary War Reenactors Got Caught Up in Facebook’s Purge...
Rory Nolan remembers the first time he was banned from Facebook. It was October 8, 2020, the day that news broke that a militia group, in concert with an FBI informant, had planned to kidnap Michigan...
View ArticleTexas Wants to Tell California How to Spend Its Money. What Happened to...
It’s been a big term for state-on-state clashes at the Supreme Court. The justices could hand down an opinion any day now in California v. Texas, a major Affordable Care Act case that pitted Republican...
View ArticleThe Weird Comfort of Getting Vaccinated at an Abandoned JC Penney
Carolyn Bennett Glauda, a librarian in Beacon, New York, got her Covid-19 shot at an abandoned JC Penney. The store went out of business around the beginning of the pandemic. But when she entered, she...
View ArticleFossil Fuel Companies Are Job Killers
As Joe Biden’s climate-scented infrastructure proposal kicks off, the fossil fuel industry has one tried and true message to fall back on: They stand for jobs, prosperity, and the working man. (That’s...
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An Epic Debate on Trump and True Evangelicalism
Through the many upheavals of the Trump era, one trend has remained strikingly stable: the mobilization of the white evangelical community as diehard supporters of the forty-fifth president. It’s a...
View ArticleDelta and Coca-Cola Won’t Save Voting Rights in Georgia
The recent battle over voting rights in Georgia has briefly disrupted the usually placid relationship between America’s corporate titans and the Republican Party. Late last month, Georgia passed...
View ArticleLast Judgment
This article is adapted from this year’s acceptance speech for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, awarded by the National Book Critics Circle. It’s such an honor to receive an...
View ArticleKick the Fracking Industry Out of Indian Country
On Sunday, The Guardian published a comprehensive report on the environmental, health, and legal issues raised by fracking in the Eastern Agency of the Navajo Nation. In particular, the outlet...
View ArticleThe Labor-Rights Legislation That Could Make Medicare for All a Reality
The most monumental pro-labor legislation since the 1930s is a few co-sponsors shy of a majority in the Senate, and it’s tough to overstate what a big deal that is: The Protect the Right to Organize...
View ArticleThe Mysteries of Stephen Hawking’s Universe
The last time Stephen Hawking was ever uncertain about his fame was before a lecture in Cambridge, in the winter of 1988. Even then, really, he should have been in no doubt. In previous years, he’d...
View ArticleOne of the Biggest Villains in the Local News Crisis Might Finally Lose
When Alden Global Capital announced its plan to take over Tribune Publishing—the Chicago-based media conglomerate that publishes the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel, and the New...
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