Elon Musk, David Stockman, and a federal building.

The Education of Elon Musk

The Reagan administration offers a cautionary tale about cost-cutting zeal crashing up against the reality of how government works.
March Madness basketball
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How Sports Betting Took Over March Madness

For decades, the NCAA vigorously opposed sports gambling. Now, March Madness is one of the most bet-on sporting events.

How Business Metrics Broke the University

The push to make students into customers incentivizes faculty to seek visibility through controversy rather than through traditional scholarly achievement.
Social security administration seal.

Social Security Is Not a Ponzi Scheme

Today’s attacks are just the latest form of backlash to the New Deal.
Farmer working a mule-drawn plow.

Racism Isn’t the Only Cause of the Racial Wealth Gap

Widening the lens to capitalism itself could yield insights on how to close the gap.
A Wages for Housework protest on Boston Common, June 1977.

The Fight for Wages for Housework

In the Seventies, one feminist movement campaigned to make domestic labour both visible and recompensed.
Henry Carey.

The Thinker Who Explains Trump’s Tariffs

Henry Charles Carey is arguably the most influential economist in American history.
Erased chalkboard in empty classroom

Cruel to Your School

Public education is meant to be a great equalizer. That’s why Trump wants to do undo it.
Egg yolk spilling from crushed egg shell

It’s Weird That Eggs Were Ever Cheap

What were we thinking, buying so many of these fragile, messy, remarkable ovals? Get used to high egg prices, it was a miracle they were low in the first place.
A man in a suit with angel wings clipped to his back, tipping a hat with six different arms.

The Cult of the Entrepreneur

Why do Americans idealize people who found businesses?
W.E.B. DuBois, seated in garden reading book, while Shirley Graham DuBois waters plants.

How Black Marxists Have Understood Racial Oppression

Black Marxist thought emphasizes the centrality of capitalism to racial oppression and the destructiveness of that oppression for all workers.
Actor Maurice Chevalier signing his MGM contract

In the Lions’ Studio

A new dual biography turns the lens on the towering architects of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
A person carrying a table into a moving van.

Why American Mobility Ground to a Halt

Once a nation of movers, the US has lost its “culture of mobility,” a new book argues. That’s been a disaster for housing affordability and economic progress.
A moving truck on cinder blocks.

How Progressives Froze the American Dream

The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.
The entrance of Fischer Bros, a Jewish grocery store, with a line of people going out the door.

The Rise of the Jewish Grocer

From kosher butchers, fruit peddlers, and herring dealers on the Lower East Side to supermarket innovators across the country
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, flanked by the U.S. and Chinese flags.

Back to the ’80s?

Trump, Xi Jinping, and the tariffs.
A drawing of a man riding a train and laying down train tracks in front of him.

The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic

You’re passionate. Purpose-driven. Dreaming big, working hard, making it happen. And now they’ve got you where they want you.
Gov. Ronald Reagan confronted student protesters in Sacramento weeks before dismissing “intellectual luxuries.”

The Day the Purpose of College Changed

After February 28, 1967, the main reason to go was to get a job.
Pedestrians, buggies, and a streetcar in a Los Angeles intersection in 1910.

LA’s Traffic Ordinance Went Into Effect 100 Years Ago. It Changed Streets Across America.

The Ordinance, which prioritized cars on the city’s roadways, quickly became the template for the country.
Trad wife dresses in six different colors.

My Babies Are Richer Than Yours: On the Lie of the Online Tradwife

A new theory of the leisure class influencer.
Photo of Wong Kim Ark and document about Chinese Exclusion.

History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism

Even Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship has a historical link to the Chinese American experience.
The “Little Red Schoolhouse” in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Schoolhouse Crock

In every generation, charlatans come along with a plan to make education better by spending less money on schools.
Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Jimmy Carter Was No Friend of Union Workers Like Me

As a worker in the 1970s, I looked forward to a Jimmy Carter administration. By the end of his term in office, I felt betrayed.
Karen Silkwood.

Whistleblower Karen Silkwood’s Urgent Message for Us

Karen Silkwood death and smear campaign highlights how retaliation against whistleblowers deflects scrutiny from power by targeting the messenger.
David Rubenstein

King David

Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein has cultivated a reputation as a well-meaning advocate of history education. What does that image mask?
Nancy Pelosi standing next to a sign that says "Protecting America's Health Care."

UnitedHealthcare’s Decades-Long Fight to Block Reform

UnitedHealthcare, the health insurer whose CEO was murdered, has spent decades fighting and winning political battles to maintain the for-profit health system.
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Nuggets of Condescension

By universalizing their own economic history, Western observers have used the past to portray African economic culture as backward and inadequate.
Crowd of construction workers next to the first Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.

The Rockefeller Christmas Tree Belongs to the Working Class

Construction workers pooled their wages to erect the first one. Their bosses co-opted the gesture, transforming it into today’s consumer spectacle.
A painting of a large camera on a film set, surrounded by green screens.

Casual Viewing

Why Netflix looks like that.
Peeling paint.

On “White Slavery” and the Roots of the Contemporary Sex Trafficking Panic

The ruling class used false claims about white women’s sexual virtue to regulate sexuality. But the “white slavery” panic was also about race, class and labor.