Choosing a visual representation for a collective can be as politically fraught as the drafting of a written manifesto, and the image that graces our masthead is no exception. I presented four options to the Jacobin editorial board, but the debate boiled down to two.

Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, once offered the following insight into his modus operandi: “I often begin writing columns by interviewing myself.

Work in a capitalist society is a conflicted and contradictory phenomenon.

It’s taken decades and millions of lives, but elite opinion is starting to move against mass incarceration. The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books ran detailed exposés on the scale and violence of the penal state.

After every long day at the office I go home to face my addiction: watching other  people work. Whether I’m gritting my teeth as elderly miners crawl through a tunnel to chip out coal, or cracking up as drag queens scurry to complete missions assigned by RuPaul (catch-phrase: “You better work!”), there’s nothing I’d rather do after a two-hour commute than watch reality television.

Naipaul’s career developed at a time when Western reactionary intellectuals could still be formidable, dynamic and unpredictable; there was space carved out on the Right for reactionary talent like Naipaul.

We’ve lost the ability to talk about social democracy (much less socialism) not simply because of a crisis of faith. It’s because the institutions with the ability to articulate an alternative discursive framework have been defeated as real political alternatives. This points to the fundamental limitation of social democracy, or “socialist capitalism,” as Michael Harrington more accurately described it. It’s a compromise between socialism and capitalism, but one that’s made on capitalism’s terms.

The Socialist Party is an unusual organization, perhaps even unique. While its policies might at first glance give the impression of a kind of progressive social democracy, its pervasive grassroots activism reveals a different reality.

an interview with Emmanuel Todd

The Left Party is neither a radical anti-capitalist formation like France’s ailing Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste or Portugal’s Bloco Esquerda, both of which define themselves as being to the left of both “official” socialist and (post-)communist parties; nor is it a social-democratized formation such as France’s Communist Party or Italy’s tragically splintered Rifondazione Communista. Rather, it is all of these things, in one formally unified, but internally contentious formation.

It’s no small feat that this mega-charity has successfully branded a color, making pink synonymous with fighting breast cancer. According to an old New York Times profile, Brinker is well aware of her achievement. Thanks to Brinker, “breast cancer has blossomed from wallflower to the most popular girl at the corporate charity prom.”