Abstract: Listen closely and you can hear the sound of the great consensus machine whirring to life as it cranks out another verdict on the way the world works. Neoliberalism, it has been decided, is finished.

Abstract: In March 2020, the writer and academic Jacqueline Rose was putting the finishing touches on her book On Violence and On Violence Against Women when the avenues of the world’s capitals grew quiet. Rose could hardly have expected to see the themes of her writing so abruptly tear open the world’s fabric.

Abstract: If we want to move toward a world that meets everyone’s needs, we will need to get serious about the role of money on the left.

Abstract: Desmond opens his book with a simple question: “why is there so much poverty in America?” His central argument is that those of us who are not poor are the beneficiaries and authors of that poverty.

Abstract: On June 1, the Supreme Court issued a significant decision against the labor movement in Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters Local Union No. 174. In an 8–1 split, the Court found that the National Labor Relations Act does not protect striking cement truck drivers from being sued by their employer, who alleges damages for lost cement caused by their work stoppage. The decision, perhaps by design, has received little public outcry.

Fulmer Hamilton stands in a boilersuit and a hard hat wielding a flare gun. Further oil production threatens disaster on the Kinloch Bravo platform, located off the coast of Scotland in the harsh conditions of the North Sea. Following a power outage, only a manual shutdown can override the system and spare the crew from a petroleum-fueled explosion. The Scottish rig worker is bending the rules, following knowledge and intuition gained on the job. Fulmer succeeds in at least momentarily saving himself and his colleagues, but only after giving himself an easier shot by firing within the blast radius created by the shutdown.

When the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law last August, it was celebrated as the biggest piece of federal climate legislation ever passed in the United States. This was an astonishingly low bar to clear: the IRA is also the country’s only real climate legislation. If its passage was a dubious landmark, it also stood at the end of an era for a U.S. climate movement galvanized nearly fifteen years earlier by the near-collapse of the UN climate conference in 2009 and the failure of previous federal legislation in 2010. Over the intervening years, the climate movement tacked sharply to the left as it grew more radical in its tactics and more visionary in its demands. The movement has undoubtedly changed the tenor of U.S. politics. But it has also run up against the limits of its power. What comes next?

Righteous Anger Sarah Jones (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 20] When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, my body responded with anger. I say body because the anger felt entirely physical. Animalistic in its intensity, it was like the cry of a trapped creature. Outsiders had placed a limit on me and on millions of others who shared with me the capacity to become pregnant. To the justices, who rule not as judges or as scholars but as clerics, our promise is contained in the womb. Whatever we are outside that organ means nothing in comparison to the people we could bear. So my anger was an assertion of myself: only a person could feel this way. No one could deny my humanity now. My response to Dobbs felt visceral and personal, but it could have been different. Anti-abortion women reacted to the decision with elation. I am a child of the American right, and anger is my first political memory. Everyone around me was so angry all the time, and not just at the "abortion mills." The world was changing around us and might leave us behind, which was an intolerable prospect. Progress threatened our churches, we thought, but more than that it threatened the country. A nation without the church in power—our church—was a nation in ruins. Anger is not always righteous, and it does not always look like a pro-choice rally. Sometimes it is a picket outside a clinic. The anger I felt as a child was an anger that adults transmitted to me. With it, they hoped to mold me into a foot soldier. But my anger shifted targets when I discovered that our side in the culture war had only two roles for a girl. The first was reproduction, and the second was to keep all the other girls in line. Much like a military, the Christian right runs on conformity. There was no uniform, but strict dress codes protected our modesty. As women in waiting, girls were thought of mostly as future wives and mothers. And any political inclinations had to follow an established trajectory. The right needs its Kellyanne Conways and its Amy Coney Barretts to soften the face it presents to the world, so women could enter right-wing politics without sustaining much reputational damage. Yet as I got older, I noticed that there seemed to be no room for the anger I was beginning to feel—anger at the men in authority over me, anger at the women who obeyed them. [End Page 21] The dress codes exhausted me. I could map out my future with paces around my mother's kitchen. Even in church, the center of my life, I could not expect to have authority. Any role I could have would be handed to me by a man with real power. I would only ever be a reflection of him. I knew vaguely of feminism, knew it to be the enemy, but in secret I began to suspect those feminists might have a point. I could not deny what I saw to myself. Women in my world occupied a second and subordinate tier to men, and I would never be an independent person. My worth depended entirely on my sexuality: on my purity and my capacity to bear children. My mind never entered into anything at all. Midway through college I knew the right was no longer my home. So I went in search of a new one. I eyed the pro-choice movement and lurked in the comments of popular feminist blogs. This was the Obama era, and liberalism was ascendant. I defended Obama passionately on my college campus. But I knew I wanted more than a polite rally or a quiet moment at the ballot box. The entire structure of the world needed to change, I thought. The exploitation of the poor had radicalized me, as had the violent foreign policy of the United States, the vulnerability of the right to an abortion, and the moral imperative of rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Obama was not Bush, but he was no savior...

Abortion Is Healthcare:Lessons From a Public Hospital Amy Zanoni (bio) Since the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, many have invoked the coat hanger and the public hospital septic abortion ward as portents of life after the fall of Roe. Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker was one of many pro-choice advocates who made direct reference to Ward 41 at Chicago's public hospital, Cook County Hospital. But by only paying attention to the horror stories of botched abortions in the pre-Roe era, we miss the other lessons that public hospitals like Cook County can teach us: even during Roe, access to abortion was limited, hard-fought, and dependent on local conditions. Public hospitals are key to understanding the brutal consequences of policies that limit people's access to healthcare, as well as the role that local governments often play in a country with no national healthcare system. In providing care to everyone who came through its doors, the public hospital approximated the right to healthcare. When county, state, and federal lawmakers undermined the right to reproductive care, Chicagoans demanded its reinstatement at Cook County Hospital. These struggles and the hospital's history shed light on the importance of tethering demands for reproductive rights to a more expansive welfare state and healthcare system. They also help us understand the crucial importance of federal action. Cook County Hospital Before Roe The State of Illinois passed its first anti-abortion law in 1827. But making abortion illegal never prevented women from having abortions. In the twentieth century, even before Roe, "abortion was not extraordinary, but ordinary," according to historian Leslie Reagan. Women with means were often able to access safe abortions in doctors' or midwives' offices. Low-income women were more likely to self-induce abortion and, as a result, more likely to suffer complications and end up in the hospital. [End Page 33] In Chicago, more often than not, that hospital was Cook County. Opened in 1866 to fulfill the county's legal obligation to finance medical care for the indigent, County (as it was called by many Chicagoans) provided a full spectrum of healthcare to the city's marginalized people. Communities of color, especially Black Chicagoans, relied disproportionately on County, the city's only public hospital until the 1990s. Historically barred from the industrial jobs most likely to provide insurance, Black Chicagoans were uninsured at higher rates. Private hospitals also routinely discriminated against Black Chicagoans. Medicaid, created in 1965, left out many people because the program was means-tested and because many private providers did not care for publicly insured patients. Before and after Roe, County provided care, reproductive and otherwise, to Chicagoans who needed it. Public hospitals all over the country played similar roles. In 1934, County admitted 1,159 patients suffering complications related to abortion; in 1949, the number reached 1,683 patients—about thirty-two per week in a city of approximately 3.6 million. By the early 1960s, hospital personnel cared for around 5,000 patients suffering complications from abortions annually. In 1965, one abortion patient was admitted to County for every 4.1 deliveries, compared to 1 in 10.8 at other Chicago hospitals. A twenty-one-year-old woman who underwent an illegal abortion in September 1970 was one such patient. An ambulance first brought her to a private hospital less than two miles from her South Side home. But hospital personnel sent her to County, about five miles to the northwest, claiming they had no obstetric beds available and that she had not previously seen a doctor on staff. (Private hospitals routinely sent uninsured or otherwise "undesirable" patients to County, a practice advocates decried as "patient dumping.") When she arrived at County, she was hemorrhaging and, according to the Chicago Daily Defender, "reacting adversely to poisoning from the dead fetus" left in her uterus. She died soon after. Cook County Hospital After Roe Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973. But it did not guarantee the right to abortion: the absence of a comprehensive healthcare system put the onus on pregnant people to find providers and pay for abortions, as scholars including Dorothy Roberts and...

Black inhabitants of the South did not respond uniformly to the rules and folkways of Jim Crow, nor do they see its demise in quite the same way. Two recent books use the authority of testimony to demonstrate this plurality. Adolph L. Reed Jr.'s The South and Imani Perry's South to America are both outstanding contributions to an ongoing debate about how to evaluate Southern culture, identity, and politics.