Rent Is the Crisis

Framing it as a “housing crisis” ignores that from the perspective of its winners, the system works just fine

Every first of the month, we hand over a share of our wages to meet our human need for housing. Our rents rise faster than our incomes, and inequality grows. Every first of the month, more tenants go without food, medication, and basic necessities to pay this tribute. More people ...
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Rent Is the Crisis

What Democrats Lose in Ignoring the Uncommitted Movement

The party has learned the wrong lessons from 1968

In anticipation of the Uncommitted National Movement’s arrival at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, press and political commentators made frequent reference to the anti-war protests turned police riots of the 1968 convention. It had been more than 50 years since internal discord among Democrats had been organized into an electoral ...
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What Democrats Lose in Ignoring the Uncommitted Movement

Economists Should Take a Page From Student Activism

Metrics help us explain the world—and ignore our own accountability

I have always loved spring in Chicago. The Loop buzzes with music and awe-struck architecture fans, while the lake fills up with swimmers braving the sun-soaked but icy water. In the evening, the air is just crisp enough for a jacket. But spring nights in 2024 were special. There was ...
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Economists Should Take a Page From Student Activism

Elite Capture and Racial Capital, from the University to Palestine

A conversation on the part-time faculty strike and freedom on campus

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and author of Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else), joined Cresa Pugh and Julie Beth Napolin at The New School in December 2023, for a conversation on racial capital in university life, the New ...
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Elite Capture and Racial Capital, from the University to Palestine

Against Technoableism

In an excerpt from her new book, Ashley Shew rethinks who needs improvement

It should go without saying that we need to center disabled people as experts about disability and technology. Yet if we do, we really trouble some underlying assumptions of the ableist world we’re in. In its simplest definition, ableism is bias or discrimination against disabled people or stigma against the ...
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Against Technoableism

Documenting the Little Abuses

An excerpt from Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression

El Grito’s video activism is part of a long line of media activist efforts that labored on the front lines against exploitation, racial stereotyping, and state violence. ...

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Documenting the Little Abuses

Black Resistance, Black Joy

In Episode 37, conversation with political theorist Christopher Paul Harris about his new book, To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care

To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care (Princeton University Press, 2023) draws on Christopher PaulHarris’s own experiences as an activist and organizer to analyze contemporary Black struggle and places that struggle in the long history of Black oppression, resistance, community making and joy....

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Black Resistance, Black Joy

To Build a Black Future

In this excerpt, an introduction to the new Black politics of joy, pain, and care

One of the critical features of the contemporary moment in Black movement, the time of #BlackLivesMatter, is how capacious the definitions of Blackness and, with it, Black radicalism have become....

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To Build a Black Future

Can a Walking Tour Rescue a Lost History?

As the pandemic hit and anti-Asian violence surged, Anna Huang and Chloe Chan started Mott Street Girls, a walking tour company, to make Chinese American history more accessible to the public

In the future, Mott Street Girls hope to have visited every Chinatown in the country. But hearing people’s feedback is what keeps them going. They believe that history can be a form of social activism....

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Can a Walking Tour Rescue a Lost History?