Always on the Run Now

"This also began Steinem's career as a provocative journalist, penning articles including If Men Could Menstruate, which ran in Ms, a magazine co-founded by Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes in 1971. The first issue featured Wonder Woman on the cover; the superhero had recently given up her powers to stay with her male love interest, and the essay argued that DC Comics should restore her powers and return the character to her feminist roots. Steinem also wrote articles such as What It Would Be Like If Women Win in Time, and After Black Power, Women's Liberation, the 1969 New York magazine article that would make her name as a feminist leader."

Sian Cain at The Guardian writes an obituary for Gloria Steinem.

"I Wanted the Subject Matter to Have Scope, Depth, Structure, and Dignity"

"I can't say the same of today's nineteen-year-olds with the same aspirations and bookish bent. English and the humanities generally have lost their grand allure. There's no point in rehearsing the fall for the umpteenth time, only to say that during the '80s canon became a bad word, a dead-white-male artifact. Perhaps the skeptics believed their takedown of the Big Picture was a liberation, and it may have been for some. But not for many. In 1970, English took one in thirteen of all four-year degrees in the United States. Now, it stands at one in sixty."

Mark Bauerlein. at Portico reminisces about being an English major at UCLA.

"There's a Reason 'Democratic' Is There at the Front of the Label"

"One of the ironies of this is that as terms developed over the first half of the 20th century, 'socialism' (in the sense of socialist parties and so forth) generally became self-identified as socialist over and against the anti-democratic elements of communism which, of course, also claimed the socialist label. Old news for people who know this history but a lot of the most intense anti-communists were socialists, though that can seem odd to those outside these sectarian debates. Indeed, the DSA, which Michael Harrington helped found in 1982, was at the forefront of that element of socialist politics."

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo warns against "[t]his vanguard, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party claptrap" in the Democratic Socialists of America.

And Joshua Zeitz at The Bulwark asks, "[d]oes the DSA genuinely admire the social-democratic European model?"  

"Marx in the Twenty-First Century"

"This is not to say that Marx thought that industrialization, mechanization, or globalization were bad things. He was no Luddite. His concern was the disconnect between profits and human need: Much like today's industrial regions, the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester that Marx observed were filled with workers who were exhausted, unhealthy, and miserable while the factory owners dined on beef bourguignon and claret in their mansions. The factories these days just happen to be in Shenzhen or Dhaka, not the other side of town. Unlike the British machine wreckers of a generation before, Marx saw no way to stuff the technological genie back into the bottle. New tools must be utilized for the greatest good: Instead of getting rid of the factories, the public should take ownership of them."

Max Holleran at The New Republic reviews David Harvey's The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works.

"Power All the Way Down"

"Already during his lifetime some scholars complained that, as the historian Lawrence Stone put it, Foucault's 'dominance and control' model 'reduces the actors in history to two, the controllers and the controlled.' In a recent book, 'Left Is Not Woke,' Neiman goes further. For the political left, she argues, Foucault's legacy has been disastrous: a reflexive distrust of Enlightenment ideals—including tolerance, universalism and progress itself—which are viewed as cynical ploys by European states to justify imperialist ambitions. His theory does not allow for a human collective bound by shared values and fighting for the common good, she writes, only for 'a bunch of tribes jockeying for power.'"

At The New York Times, Emily Eakin marks the 100th birthday of Michel Foucault.

And at Slate, Laura Miller reviews Eakin's The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory.

"Intense Politicisation, with Neither Institutional Roots nor Ambitions"

"'On the surface,' Jäger writes, 'the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.' As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s evocative phrase 'bodies without organs'. Modern political movements, he writes, are 'concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism'."

Zoe Williams at The Guardian talks with Anton Jäger, author of Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences.

"A Cesspool of Prissy Repression and Recklessly Moronic Freedom That Now Stands as an Embarrassment to One and All"

"Like every decade, the '90s had its cathartic heights. And like the '60s, it seemed like a period in which the culture was moving forward, albeit fitfully, toward a more progressive, enlightened future, at least in our fuzz-pedal-hazy minds. But it was also a decade of repulsive depths, craven money-grabs, and Pauly Shore's film career."

Charles Aaron in a 2013 Spin article presents "The 50 Worst Moments of the '90s."

"The Reckoning Coming When the MAGA Sleeping Giant Awakens"

"A January New York Times and Siena poll found 65 percent of voters say a middle-class life is simply out of reach, and 77 percent say it’s harder to reach now than it was for their parents. That isn't a 'left' or 'right' number: that's my dad's vanished paycheck and benefits, expressed as despair, across the whole country.

Which is precisely why the morbidly rich oligarchs and their lickspittle politicians, and the billionaire-owned media, work so hard to keep us in these neat little categories and at each others' throats."

Thom Hartmann at Alternet writes that "[t]he instant working people stop asking 'who's the enemy who looks, prays, or loves differently than I do' and start asking 'who took my dad's paycheck,' the whole game is over."

"If the Study of History Teaches Anything, It Teaches Us the Limitations of Life"

"Professor Wood distilled what he found exceptional in the Revolutionary period in 'The Radicalism of the American Revolution.' 'To base a society on the commonplace behavior of ordinary people,' he wrote, 'may be obvious and understandable to us today, but it was momentously radical in the long sweep of world history up to that time.'"

At The New York Times, David Stout, Alex Traub, and Ash Wu write an obituary for Gordon S. Wood.

And David Waldstreicher at The New Republic writes an appreciation.

"This Was Supposed to Be a Change Revolution, but Voters Clearly Said No to the Revolution"

"'I think the Democrats' prospects are very bright in 2026 given the California Republicans' dysfunctionality and a complete backlash against Donald Trump,' Adams said. 'But I have much bigger concerns about the California Democrats long term, because it seems to me they're setting a record for most consecutive years of failing to fix the state's problems while getting reelected anyway.'"

Jenny Jarvie at the Los Angeles Times reports reactions to the results of California's primary elections.

And Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect explains "How California Politics Became So Blah."

"PBS-ification"

"But it is noticeable that as the folk memory of punk and of the mid-Sixties and rock'n'roll, has faded,  so too is that distrust of art that Marcus wrote about approvingly, that Drummond enacted, that Bangs took for granted...

Gradually there has been a growing resignation towards the very thing that Nik Cohn found intolerable–the division between industrialised chartpop, brainless if entertaining trash, and a separate zone of 'fine music', which is totally comfortable with seeing itself as art."

Simon Reynolds presents a transcript of a talk he made at Harvard University in 2012.

"Probably Did More Than Any Organization to Expose the Society's Dark Side to the World"

"No smear campaign, this was an exposé. The covert program ginned up negative press and made the society toxic in the eyes of most Americans. The exposure neutered the ability of violent, conspiratorial, white-supremacist elements associated with the society to win elective office or dominate either the Democratic or the Republican party. And the ADL's campaign forced Birchers to spend time, energy, and resources fending off charges of extremism or bigotry. The incessant public conversation about Birchers as a hate-filled group generated the impression that the organization must be tainted and ought to be shunned."

Matthew Dallek at The Bulwark discusses how the Anti-Defamation League challenged the John Birth Society.

"Calls This Period of Economic Growth One of the 'Two Pillars' Supporting That Era's Anomalously High Marriage Rates"

"Free-market conservatives toppled one pillar, and feminism toppled the other, bringing us to our current era of record high inequality and singlehood. The conservatives trying to revive midcentury marriage patterns place the blame squarely on feminists, even though the regressive economic agenda enacted by conservatives themselves made it all but inevitable that marriage would become what Coontz and other social scientists call 'a luxury good.'"

Anna Louie Sussman at The New Republic reviews Stephanie Coontz's For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage.

"A Luminous Quality That Can Be Almost Blinding"

"You can hardly blame Monroe for being overwhelmed by her own image. In her lifetime, she was far and away the most photographed woman in the world, which is another way of saying that she was the most desired. Marilyn Monroe became a movie star in the years following World War II and died just before the social movements of the 1960s permanently altered the face of the nation. Her career was almost exactly contemporaneous with the '50s, that decade of unparalleled American prosperity and power."

Moira Donegan at Bookforum reviews Marilyn Monroe 100: The Official Centenary Book.

Let's Dance

"That's what birthed punk rock. Not anarchy but ennui. The energy had to go somewhere. It went into a fast, urgent 'One, two, three, four…'"

Jonathan Eig at AudioPhix marks the fiftieth anniversary of Ramones.

And Simon Price at The Quietus discusses the Ramones' impact in Britain.

"He Refuses to 'Let Defeatism Have the Last Word'"

"Later, he said he wouldn't have found his way into philosophy and social theory if he hadn't experienced confronting the reality of Nazi crimes as a young man. He recalled that 'you saw suddenly that it was a politically criminal system in which you had lived'." 

At The Guardian, Donna Ferguson and Philip Oltermann report the death of Jürgen Habermas.

"We Continue to Live in the Wake of Mid- to Late-60s Developments"

"It's easy to look back at the Johnson administration, with the benefit of hindsight, and see little possibility for the revitalization of the New Deal coalition. But it's important to remember just what a moment of political sea change the mid-1960s was. With the exit of the Dixiecrats, the Democratic Party was in the midst of a profound transformation wherein its base did substantively shift. That [Bayard] Rustin saw an opening for the civil rights and organized labor coalition to take a driving seat within the party was not that fanciful, yet it was treated that way by a curious number of people on the Left then and still on the Left today. It's worth asking why that was and is. His critics on the Left are fine pillorying Rustin for his comments on anti-war protest tactics. But where are the similar condemnations of the New Left for sitting out the fight for the Freedom Budget for All Americans, arguably the last off-ramp from an imminent neoliberalism?"

Damage Magazine runs Benjamin Y. Fong's introduction to the new book Rustin's Challenge.

"A Cautionary Tale, Not a Triumphal One"

"This dark history has a happy ending, sort of. The Environmental Protection Agency began forcing smelting companies to install pollution controls in the 1970s. The EPA's phaseout of leaded gasoline, fought by oil company lawsuits for years, was basically complete by the mid-1980s. Blood lead levels in the population dropped 78 percent from 1976 to 1991, and crime rates began dropping dramatically in 1992. The correlation was so close it gave rise to a 'lead-crime hypothesis' among epidemiologists. The nationwide number of serial killers, whose average age is 22, dropped, too, from 669 in the 1990s to 117 by the decade ending in 2020; a 2007 analysis concluded that there was a 'robust' connection between childhood lead exposure and violent crime. Whatever inborn tendency to serial murder that seems to exist in some men may have lost its environmental trigger."

In a 2025 Washington Post article, Wendy Smith reviews Caroline Fraser's Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers.

"An Optimistic Cultural Renaissance Will Have to Precede Political Reform"

"But now, I wonder if my notion of culture being grounded in music or film has been eclipsed by the culture of the algorithm. For the past 10 years, in books like Move Fast and Break Things and The End of Reality, I have been writing about how a few tech billionaires have built unimagined fortunes by destroying our culture. The technocrats are well-known: Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman. The project of 'disruption' these men championed at the dawn of the digital age has ended with the immiseration of musicians, journalists, and photographers."

Jonathan Taplin at Rolling Stone asks, "Can the Counterculture Rise Again?"

The Left Wing of the Possible?

"In recent polls, about 40 percent of Americans say they have a 'positive image' of socialism. A clear majority of people under 30 feel that way. But for most of them the term evokes what Mamdani and other social democrats who have actually managed to win elections try to achieve: a more secure life in a society that narrows class differences without preventing some individuals from becoming rich as long as they create products or services that ordinary people value. Four decades ago, the great social-democratic author Irving Howe described those 'socialists' who managed to gain influence in capitalist countries: 'They engage themselves with the needs of the moment, struggling for betterment in matters large and small, reforms major and modest: They do not sit and wait for the millennium.'"

At The New Republic, Michael Kazin says that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is "not a democratic socialist but a social democrat."

But Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot offers caution about "The Future of the Left in the 21st Century."