The amber street­lights standing sentry over the Nile Cornice running in front of the com­mu­ni­ca­tions building in the Maspero complex in downtown Cairo do something odd to peoples’ col­oration at night, flat­ten­ing and softening bright colors, turning the assem­blages of people into a chiaroscuro – here and there a green laser lacing through the smoke [...]

Jacobin editor Peter Frase responded to this piece.

The image of UC Davis officer John Pike holding high the can and giving peaceful Occupy Davis protesters a mouthful of orange pepper spray has, like so many other images, become part of the growing Occupy iconography surrounding police brutality. These attacks are surely disproportionate [...]

Thirteen civil rights demonstrators were shot dead by the British Army on the day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, in northern Ireland, forty years ago today. But the Guardian thought it was the Civil Rights activists who were to blame:

The organisers of the demonstration, miss Bernadette Devlin [...]

Fifteen years ago, it was observed that a major proportion of those who supported the reactionary position of Senator Robert Taft were people over 60, people who were still able to regard the graduated income tax, for example, as a wicked innovation. It was understandable that people of that generation, brought up to regard the [...]

In what has become something of a masochistic ritual, for the last week I have been eagerly awaiting the release of the annual report on union membership in the U.S., which the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases every year at the end of January. To my surprise, this year’s report was not as grim as I had expected it to [...]

After my recently published article, “Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders,” went semi-viral, thanks in no small part to Valerie Strauss, who republished it in its entirety at her Washington Post education blog, I received quite a bit of interesting feedback from readers. Some of it was negative [...]

It was a good day for the first anniver­sary of the beginning of the Egyptian insur­rec­tion. Most of the past week has been grey, cloudy, an early khamsin filling the air with desert dust. Last night early arrivers to Tahrir Square were welcomed with a shower. But today was almost balmy as we set out [...]

Back in 2009 or 2010, I often found myself ranting about the things the Left would say about the Tea Party. No, the Tea Partiers aren’t some Astroturf mirage, I would grumble. Nor are they a mob of downtrodden sans-culottes, a band of fascists, or a generic herd of populists. The Tea [...]

In “Occupy Economics,” I mentioned Stephen Marglin, a radical Harvard economics professor who got tenure before the crackdown of the 1970s, and who is still there teaching an alternative undergrad economics course. He has to his name a number of absolute classics of radical political economy: “What do bosses do?” (Part I,

An editor of this rag recently admonished lefties for their enthusiastic adoption of “precariat,” a blanket term for workers with little-to-no job security. In Sunkara’s estimation, a word that encompasses both graphic designers and migrant farm workers elides too many differences to be theoretically useful. He points out that even Dissent—that staid bastion of social [...]