What Is a Generation?
Surely it is not just a matter of age or biology, but something more—a collective frustration with the world as it is and a desire to find new ways to change it.
Fall 2024
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Steady Work
When left activists divide their energies between the immediate present and the distant future, we miss the necessary political work between now and then.
A Politics of Ambition
Politics cannot just be about consensus. It must also be about conflict. More important, it must always be about asking for more.
The Next Majority
No matter who becomes the Democrats’ nominee, Bernie Sanders’s campaign marks a sea change within the Democratic Party.
State of Emergency
In the wake of the Paris terror attacks this past November, François Hollande reassured the French public, “Terrorism will not destroy the republic, because it is the republic that will destroy terrorism.” He then pressed the French parliament to give …
Worlds in Waiting: The Promise of Little Magazines
By remaining outside the mainstream, little magazines can articulate those demands and alternatives that are just left of the possible. Our hope is that these ideas will trickle up.
Into the Cave: Sheldon Wolin’s Search for Democracy
Sheldon Wolin dedicated his career to championing not just a new politics but a new kind of politics—one that refused to substitute top-down administration for the messy uncertainties of democracy.
In Praise of Amateur Politics
Leftists will never entirely be released from the obligation to engage with the Democratic Party, but the left’s strength, and its power, will always lie outside formal politics.
With a counter-argument from Michael Kazin.
Permanent Emergency: The Bomb and the Democratic Process
Seventy years after the bombing of Hiroshima, we still live in the mushroom cloud of secrecy and permanent emergency imposed by nuclear weapons.
Citizen Politics
The new groundswell of mobilized citizens suggests an important break—not only with how we imagine politics but also with how we practice it.
The Soapbox Left
The democratic left has always operated on a theory of trickle-up politics. Strikes, protests, and acts of civil disobedience all begin at the bottom—on the shop-floor, in the university, at the town square—and then make their way up. The abolitionists …
Introduction: The Gunshot Concert
Introducing our special Fall edition on Politics and the Novel—with essays by Nikil Saval, Vivian Gornick, Benjamin Hale, Helen Dewitt, Nina Martyris, and Roxane Gay—David Marcus asks: what happened to the political novel?
Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity
For Zadie Smith, the time had come for the radicalism of experiment and the realism of political economy—for a new social realism that was capable of capturing both the mechanics and experience of today’s growing inequality.
The Horizontalists
By working outside structures of power one may circumvent coercive systems but not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politics—stripping it of its larger institutional ambitions—has its advantages, but without a larger structural vision, it does not go far enough.
Time in the Age of Immediacy
On the rise and fall of the newsmagazine
