Archive Image

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.





Archive Image

The Next Majority  

No matter who becomes the Democrats’ nominee, Bernie Sanders’s campaign marks a sea change within the Democratic Party.



Archive Image

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 …













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 …



Archive Image

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?





Archive Image

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.