#MoneyAndPower

As much as we may want their subjects to be actors in the historical sense, there are no individuals; there is only society, plainly laid out for us to see.…

Among filmmakers, dread over money seemed to outweigh any sense of buzz. By the first weekend the lack of major sales had already become a central topic of conversation.…

Biaggi’s rise went hand-in-hand not just with law and order politics but with a shift in the balance of power within the police profession writ large—away from the respected chiefs, and toward the irascible rank and file and the unions that represented…

As the tragedy of murder and destruction unfolds in Iran—and Lebanon, and Palestine—an unbearable farce is simultaneously being staged in the imperial center.

In retrospect, the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration was an inopportune time for Walmart to hold the grand opening of its new corporate campus.

The ongoing uprising is rooted in the political economy of structural adjustment, which forms the unstable medium through which revolt becomes contagious.

Adams will be remembered for his petty corruption, his self-mythologizing, and his ignominious dealmaking with the Trump White House; but he should also be remembered as the mayor who got New Yorkers to stop tossing giant bags of trash onto city sidewalks…

If the enshrinement of a salary cap does not yet feel entirely inevitable, the prospect of a lockout does, at least amongst the baseball commentariat.…

The Dodgers’ model, like the city’s, depends on endless escalation, infinite growth; more spending, more spectacle, more winning. The Reds, meanwhile, live on prayer and parsimony.…

If the Democratic discourse du jour pits populist socialism against technocratic “Abundance,” nobody seems to have told New York City voters.…

Two recent books, Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine and Andrew deWaard’s Derivative Media, explore the consequences of these technological intermediaries for the music, film, and television industries.…

“I am a democratic socialist.” These words were really spoken by an American politician on live TV, just hours after being elected to govern a city with a population greater than that of all but twelve US states, in the year 2025.

It was not the underprivileged who took the initiative. It was one Luke Iseman, merchant of hardware and software, founder of multiple companies, former director of a “tech incubator,” builder of art installations for the Burning Man festival.

After Milton Friedman published a 1975 compilation of writings titled There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, the phrase (lifted from Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel about a lunar penal colony) became something of a libertarian shibboleth.

Semiotically, it's detached from all these kinds of things that it was originally designed for. But this kind of sign was always part of the corporate blandification of the American travel experience.…

To be free is to be a subject instead of an object, to be able to act decisively in the world rather than only to be acted upon. For Du Bois, as for young people in Gaza and on college campuses around the world, by attempting to create a new freedom in…

Today anti-China policies are a rare point of bipartisan consensus. Popular opinion on China has steadily soured since the 2000s, first among business owners, then the public.…

None of the following receives a substantive assessment in When the Clock Broke: NAFTA, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America,” Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton’s political career, George W.…

If the government is good for business, why destroy the government? It’s possible Musk really believes he is saving the American economy. By all accounts a fervent believer in whatever he currently believes in — stopping climate change, colonizing Mars,…

Perceptive critics noted early on that Serra’s sculpture only made sense in relation to its time and place and gave meaning only to those specific conditions against which it unfolded. Serra insisted on as much himself.…