The Zealot
Jonathan Franzen’s Midwestern broods, like horsemen of the apocalypse, ride through his books heralding various endings: of eras, of bygone mores, of novels themselves.
Winter 2026
- Subscribe
- Magazine
- Online
- Blog
- Podcasts
- Events
- Store
- Logout
- About Us
- Donate
- Contact
- Advertise
- Newsletter
Therapy With a Human Face
The feminization of therapy is crucial to understanding how it became both devalued and out of reach.
It’s Time to Take Woke Capital Seriously
The left tends to dismiss corporate pandering to identity politics as insincere and inconsequential. It does so at its peril.
After Globalization
Neoliberal globalization shifted the social risks of the economic system away from companies and the wealthy and toward workers and citizens. As this system unravels, leftists must develop a politics of social protection to counter a surging right.
We Loved Each Other Too Much
In Sally Rooney’s latest novel, class struggle is presented as just one more thing to be debated.
Maybe We Could Be Each Other’s Moms
The core spirit of Sex Education, easily missed on account of its boisterous sex-positivity, is the sophisticated sexual prudence of Generation Z.
The Limits of Privatized Climate Policy
We cannot make the most urgent infrastructural investments of our lifetimes with gentle signals to financial markets. The clearest path forward is to embrace the capacity of the state.
The Political Philosophy of Care
In Reckoning, Deva Woodly makes a case for radical Black feminist pragmatism, a philosophy “that takes lessons from many twentieth-century ideologies and forges them into a political ethic for our times.”
A Democratic Vision for Antitrust
The antitrust reform project wants to contain domination and expand autonomy—key principles of a left political project.
Is There an Alternative? The Macroeconomics of the Biden Administration
The response to COVID-19 proved that the federal government is far more capable of managing the economy than many people thought. What happens now that Bidenomics faces rising headwinds?
Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection
The growing militancy of the Republican right is less about an alliance of small business against big business than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.
A New Era?
The work of the left at this moment is to understand what new spaces have opened up and how to build upon them.
Introducing our Winter 2022 special section, “Beyond Bidenomics.”
Asymmetric War and Its Journalists
If we ask the right questions, we might well conclude that political struggle rather than war is the better strategy for both sides in virtually all asymmetric conflicts.
Born Into the Dark
What happens to progressives who give up on progress?
Community College: The Great Equalizer?
Even if community colleges were fully funded, students could still face a curriculum and styles of instruction that reinforce their unequal position in the social order.
