You’re welcome — I know animated GIFs don’t come included with your New Left Review or Socialist Register subscriptions. But the spring issue of Jacobin, out in May, is more than just a bright and shiny thing to admire from afar. It’s a bright and shiny thing to read unnaturally close to your face.

Unfortunately, the printed version of Rob Pybus’ cover will be static and not animated. Bourgeois research imperatives prevent the emergence of that type of technology. It’s still something worth seeing in the flesh though.

Inside the issue is just as great. Our special section on strategy features four pieces, each representing distinct tendencies on the Left. We sought to avoid the classic “What is to be done?” in favor of the more difficult “Who the hell is going to do it?” The section is anchored by an essay by NTanya Lee and Steve Williams that should spark valuable conversation among activists.

There’s many more standouts — Nivedita Majumdar’s review of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland and Sam Gindin’s nine theses on today’s global capitalism, to name a couple — but everything in there is incredibly sharp. Not only is it our favorite collection of essays yet, it’s our best illustrated, too. Style and substance!

Readers can still subscribe or renew their subscriptions, but be sure to do so by April 21 to make the cut-off for the issue. That’d be the last day to update your mailing address, as well.

If you had any problems receiving past issues, send us an e-mail and we’ll sort everything out for the next time around. We have a reliable new distributor and even fancier polybags.

Though it should be obvious, it’s worth mentioning again how expensive maintaining a print publication is. Recent postal hikes and the resources we put into our Class Action project and book series make your support more necessary than ever.

Please consider donating to Jacobin.

Strategy

Power Play

by Editors

We need to get down to the work of building a radical civil society: forging social and organizational “infrastructures of dissent,” developing our capacities to understand the world and articulate a compelling alternative moral vision, and linking these resources to a dynamic social base.

The New Protest Era

by Frances Fox Piven

We are at the beginning of a new period of mass protests that will reshape American politics.

Occupy After Occupy

by Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis

Its critics may disagree, but Occupy Wall Street’s legacy has been enduring.

Free the Land

by Bhaskar Sunkara

In his last interview, Chokwe Lumumba discusses popular power and the past and future of revolutionary struggle in the American South.

No Shortcuts

by NTanya Lee and Steve Williams

The need to develop a strategy that can cohere the different parts of our movement has never been more clear.

Essays

Bad Science

by Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones

Free-market academic research policies have unleashed medical quackery and scientific fraud, and forced us to pay premiums for discoveries we’ve already funded as taxpayers.

Waiting for SCOTUS

by Rob Hunter

By fixating on the Supreme Court, liberals have inherited the framers’ skepticism of popular sovereignty and mass politics.

Unmaking Global Capitalism

by Sam Gindin

Nine things to know about organizing in the belly of the beast.

Pink Collar

by Jennifer Pan

When writers attack bad PR, the unspoken heart of their criticism is the publicist’s failure to adequately conceal that she is performing emotional work for money.

Culture

A Red with an FBI Badge

On reactionary novelist James Ellroy and his Underworld USA trilogy’s surprising treatment of communism and anti-communism.

By Peter Berard

Change the People

A recent book on musician Fred Ho reveals some starting points for a modern radical avant-garde.

By Alexander Billet

Crocodile Tears of the Wolf

by Eileen Jones

The Wolf of Wall Street’s eleventh-hour Hail Mary doesn’t atone for the rest of the film’s celebration of rich assholes.

Books

Bulletproof Neoliberalism

by Paul Heideman

To understand how a body of thought became an era of capitalism requires more than intellectual history.

Reading Jhumpa Lahiri Politically

by Nivedita Majumdar

Jhumpa Lahiri’s failure in The Lowland is not one of style, but of sensibility. She has little investment in the spirit of the Naxalite movement she chooses to depict.