The Care Gap
While childcare costs have soared, wages in the industry have stayed flat—leaving nearly half of childcare workers dependent on public benefits to survive. Why is the labor of educating children worth so little?
Winter 2026
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Belabored Podcast #97: Building Black Futures with Janae Bonsu
Janae Bonsu, from Black Youth Project 100, talks about the group’s “Agenda to Build Black Futures,” and why we need to think of economic justice and racial justice as intertwined.
Ferguson Digs In Its Heels
The city of Ferguson has reneged on its promises to reform policing practices. Its current standoff with the Justice Department reveals the stubbornness of a municipal system that combines handouts to big corporations with predatory fines for the poor.
Choosing War
By reframing war in terms of “moral injury,” philosopher Nancy Sherman dodges the question of who is responsible for its horrors in the first place.
Sanders and the S Word
Why does the white-haired firebrand from Vermont insist on identifying himself with socialism, a political faith that has never been popular in the United States?
Booked: The War on Booze
An interview with historian Lisa McGirr about her new book The War On Alcohol, and why Prohibition was more important than most people think.
Gulf Dreams for Justice: From Rescue to Solidarity
The Gulf countries’ migrant labor regime is brutal. But calling it “slavery” obscures what is really a highly modern system of exploitation—and the struggles of workers themselves to change it.
A Tour of the American Left
An interview with Daniel Oppenheimer about his new book Exit Right, a survey of the twentieth-century American left, seen through the eyes of six men who left it behind and turned to the right.
The Right vs. The Family
Despite the right’s appeals to “family values,” free-market policies are extremely destructive to American families.
Against the Political Grown-Up
The Democratic elite’s dismissal of the Sanders campaign ultimately reflects a contempt for democratic ideals.
Belabored Podcast #96: Sick of Austerity in Detroit and Flint
Joel Berger, a second-generation Detroit public school teacher, talks about teacher protests over the city’s dilapidated schools and the water crisis in Flint.
Science in the Service of Untruth: A Century of Lead Poisoning
From apple orchards in the 1930s to Flint today, lead poisoning—and politicians seeking to cover it up—have a long history in the United States.
Who Owns the GOP?
Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is a magisterial portrait of the right-wing billionaires who have “weaponized” conservative philanthropy and pulled the GOP ever further right. Yet Mayer’s account fails to explain something just as alarming: the far-right surge from the grassroots.
Money Troubles
Personal budgeting advice promises to set us free, but only on an individual level. Instead we need social programs that would allow any woman to flip a finger to unsavory work situations and domestic abuse.
Socialism in America
If Bernie Sanders’s presidential run is to herald a new socialist movement, American leftists will have to overcome the combination of sectarianism, repression, and cooptation that doomed their predecessors.
