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Hand facing palm up and holding three pills.

Unreasonable Terms

How American drug companies have exploited government contracts to pursue profit over public interest.
2024 Republican presidential debate on Fox News.
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How Cable News Upended American Politics

Cable TV's backers sold the technology as a boon to democracy, but embraced a business model that chased niche audiences.
Cover of the book "24/7 Politics," featuring photos of Nixon and Carter.

The Battlefields of Cable

How cable TV transformed politics—and how politics transformed cable TV.
1916 advertisement for De Angelis Brand Superior Quality Macaroni Products.

When Socialists Put an End to Pasta Inflation

The history of food inflation during World War I, and the riots that halted it, show how capitalists take advantage of consumer expectations to price gouge.
Collage of Supreme Court and 14th amendment-related images.

Reversing the Legacy of Slaughter-House

A careful examination of the Privileges or Immunities Clause shows what we lost 150 years ago.
March Madness Stadium

A Harsh Reality Lies Beneath the Glory of March Madness

Despite captivating the nation with their athleticism every March, collegiate basktball players remain an exploited labor force for the profit of the NCAA.
Detail from a Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers graphic, 1877.

America’s Oldest Railway Union Must Break With Its Right-Wing Past

Why does the government have the power to break massive union strikes? Part of the story is a history of conciliatory railway unionism.
Illustration of Annette Gordon-Reed.

Majority Rule on the Brink

The legacies of our racial past, and the prospects ahead for an embattled republic.
Servers at a Facebook data center

Build a Better Internet

An interview with Ben Tarnoff, the author of "Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future."
A line of cars waiting their turn at a filling station in Portland, Oregon, 1973.

The Price of Oil

The history of control and decontrol in the oil market.
Men engaged in the various stages of making glass bottles in London, 1888.

Workers Have Been Fighting Automation Ever Since Capitalism Began

Automation didn’t start in the age of robots and microchips, but can be traced back to the late 19th century glass industry and its skilled glass workers.
A political cartoon lampooning the “robber baron” monopolists’ exploitation of laborers, 1883

When Americans Liked Taxes

The idea of liberty has often seemed to mean freedom from government and its spending. But there is an alternate history, one just as foundational and defining.
A woman standing in a field.
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Drug Prohibition and the Political Roots of Cartel Violence in Mexico

Until both American and Mexican police forces stop treating it like a war, the violence of drug prohibition won't stop.
Pills in a week organizer.
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Drug Companies Keep Merging. Why That’s Bad For Consumers and Innovation.

Over 30 years, dramatic consolidation has meant higher prices, fewer treatment options and less incentive to innovate.
President Biden in a warehouse
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Government Has Always Picked Winners and Losers

A welfare state doesn't distort the market; it just makes government aid fairer.
Mark McGwire baseball card

Neoliberalism with a Stick of Gum: The Meaning of the 1980s Baseball Card Boom

Before beanie babies and Pogs, small rectangles of cardboard were the errant investments of a stratifying American society.
Syringes with the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on a table
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Having Vaccines Alone Isn’t Enough to Defeat Covid-19

Distributing them equally is key to defeating the coronavirus.
Political cartoon depicting the menace of monopolies and trusts (1899)

Degeneration Nation

How a Gilded Age best seller shaped American race discourse.
1912 political cartoon of the Aldrich Plan depicted as an octopus with tentacles on a bank, a factory, and a farm while spitting coins into the NYSC.

A Popular History of the Fed

On Populist programs and democratic central banking.

The Long Roots of Corporate Irresponsibility

Nicholas Lemann’s history of 20th century corporations, Transaction Man, shows how an unrelenting faith in the market and profit doomed the American economy.
Leland Stanford, oil painting by French artist Ernest Meissonier, 1881. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Was Leland Stanford a ‘Magnanimous’ Philanthropist or a ‘Thief, Liar, and Bigot?’

The railroad baron and governor of California was starkly contradictory and infamously disruptive.
Milton Friedman.

Milton Friedman Was Wrong

The famed economist’s “shareholder theory” provides corporations with too much room to violate consumers’ rights and trust.

Lessons From the Gilded Age

America today has a lot in common with that bygone era of monopolies and gross inequality. But will the country respond similarly?

Agriculture Wars

On country music as a lens through which to trace the corporatization of American farming.
New Mexico landscape painting by Marsden Hartley.

A Tramp Across America

How a Los Angeles Times editor helped create the myth of the American West.
The port of Canton

China and the American Revolution

Explaining the global impact of British-Chinese relations during the colonial period.

Oil Barrels Aren't Real Anymore

Once a cask that held crude, the oil barrel is now mostly an economic concept.
Man reading paper about gas rationing in front of a sign that reads "sorry no gasoline."
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1973 – The Year That Changed Everything

The story of the oil shocks of 1973 and how they continue to shape the world we live in today.
Picture of a truck stop.

Every Which Way but Regulated: The “Free Market” Trucking Industry

No longer home to the open-road outlaws and concrete cowboys of the ’70s, becoming a trucker is now the equivalent of operating a sweatshop on wheels thanks to deregulation.
Lithograph of the reservoir of the Manhattan Water Works in 1825.
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Corporations in the Early Republic

An explanation of the Manhattan Company, a bank disguised as a municipal water corporation that helped to transform Early Republican politics.

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