Classroom Saints and Fiends
Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars shows that the failed ideas underlying today’s ed-reform crusade are as old as public education itself.
Winter 2026
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Booked #4: What Did Race Mean to W.E.B. Du Bois?
Tim Shenk talked with Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity, about how Du Bois’s experiences as a black American shaped his theories of race, and how his theories relate to politics then and now.
The Long Shadow of Neoconservatism
The great majority of the American political class were complicit in the deceptions that led to the Iraq war—and are desperate for the rest of the country to forget it.
Organizing the Unorganizable
Worker centers have empowered nurses, nannies, busboys, taxi drivers, and many other low-wage immigrants long thought to be “unorganizable.” They provide clues to the future of organized labor—but can their victories scale up?
Belabored Podcast #76: May Day Special! Labor Shuts It Down From Baltimore to Long Beach
This May Day, we bring you voices from the streets of Baltimore and Long Beach—where unions are helping mobilize their communities against police terror and for economic justice—and from a West Coast Walmart, where activist Venanzi Luna has been leading the fight against union-busting. Plus: Whatever happened to the eight-hour day?
Border City Blues
It is no coincidence that the starkest reactions to police violence—from Ferguson to Baltimore—have flared in cities strung along the Mason-Dixon Line.
Liberal Punishment
Naomi Murakawa’s remarkable book The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America shows how, since the 1940s, liberals have provided legitimacy for the prison state.
A Conservative Case for the Welfare State
A longtime Republican Party insider explains why American dog-eat-dog capitalism is a disaster—even by conservatives’ own measures.
The Revolution in Rojava
The Kurds of northern Syria are building an enclave of radical democracy and feminism in the middle of a devastating war—and beating back ISIS in the process. Why aren’t more leftists paying attention?
The French Dilemma
It is crucial to avoid treating the Charlie Hebdo attacks as shots in a war waged on France.
Belabored Podcast #75: What’s Next in the Fight for $15?
Following Wednesday’s nationwide protests for a living wage, Sarah and Michelle spoke with workers in New York and Atlanta about why they joined the Fight for $15 movement and what they hope it will achieve.
Between Labour and a Hard Place
The ideological gap between Labour and the Tories is larger today than at any time in the past twenty years. But will the popularity of Labour’s social-democratic program prevail over lukewarm support for its leader—and the rise of the far right?
The Men in the Middle
If there’s an engine that continues to draw millions of workers into the Persian Gulf’s draconian labor regime, it is the middlemen—the underground network of recruitment agents that reaches into every corner of rural South Asia, dangling the possibility of a better life before communities ravaged by neoliberalism.
The Assistant Economy
Welcome to the main artery into creative or elite work—highly pressurized, poorly recompensed, sometimes exhilarating, more often menial. From the confluence of two grand movements in American history—the continued flight of women out of the home and into the workplace, and the rise of the “creative class”—the personal assistant is born.
American Orientalism
From the late nineteenth century to our post-9/11 era, Americans have imagined South Asians simultaneously as exotic and barbaric, magical and menacing—to the detriment of those immigrants who are already most vulnerable.
