By Atef Abu Saif | All of a sudden, with the resumption of war, Khan Younis has become the Israeli’s primary target. It’s like they have followed me here. Last night, shelling and missile strikes could be heard on all sides. I hadn’t seen a ‘ring of fire’ style attack since I left the north, but as I lay on Mamoun’s floor, trying to sleep, the orchestra of war struck up again. Likewise, the old habits kicked in: counting the attacks, speculating on the types of rockets being used, wondering where each strike landed. Read more →

By Atef Abu Saif | I spent three hours this morning walking the streets, just walking and reflecting on things. Last night was another violent one. The siege is closing in on al-Shifa. Yesterday the administrators had to excavate a mass grave in front of the building to bury all the dead in, whilst trying not to be shot in the process. Closer to home, we heard renewed attacks on the nearby Indonesian Hospital in the early hours. Many civilian houses were hit. People’s access to that hospital has become impossible. Read more →

By Landon Y. Jones | The received wisdom is that Donald Trump was an aberration in American political life. Attention to his rise usually focuses on his assiduously cultivated celebrity status and picturesque obsession with acquiring more fame, more praise, and more money. Yet he was hardly the first celebrated American to make a calculated leap into politics. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Here we are again with the nail-biting tension from four years ago. The neck-and-neck polls between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump alerted our attention to other issues at play in addition to the debate and rally talking points. Lies about voter fraud that distract us from how voter suppression at the systemic level threatens our voting rights. Read more →

By Steve Early | How has the RPA managed to operate year-round for two decades as a multi-issue, membership-based organization and make steady electoral progress in the face of well-funded corporate opposition? Read more →

By Atef Abu Saif | Last night was most violent. Some 600 people were killed in attacks on different parts of the Strip. At around 11pm I heard an explosion nearby. The usual sequence: the screech of a rocket, a flash in the darkness, then the explosion. I was lying on the mattress, in the middle of the flat (away from the windows), trying to sleep, and had almost dosed off when I noticed a dark and noxious cloud filling the street. No one seemed to be out there. Read more →

By Steve Early | On a Saturday evening last spring, Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) co-chair Claudia Jimenez hosted a high-spirited rally and party with 200 supporters of her re-election campaign for the Richmond City Council. Jimenez is a forty-six-year-old immigrant from Columbia, who worked as an architect and community organizer before seeking elected office four years ago in her diverse, blue-collar city of 114,000, that’s eighty-percent non-white. Read more →

By Atef Abu Saif | I hardly slept last night. For the last two nights I’ve managed to keep a kind of routine: dinner at 8pm, smoke a narghile till 9pm, catch up with WhatsApp messages till 9.15; call Hanna and the kids and talk to them till about 10.45, after which I’m ready to sleep. For two nights it worked. Last night, though, it didn’t. Read more →

By Samira K. Mehta | Since Kamala Harris has become the Democratic candidate for president, her multiracial identity has returned to the news. Harris is the child of a Black Jamaican father and a South Asian mother. You can read that heritage as multiracial, as we are increasingly inclined to do now, but for most of American history, Harris would have been read more or less exclusively as Black. Vice-President Harris has explained that her mother knew this aspect of American race relations, and so she understood that Kamala and her sister Maya would be seen as Black girls and then as Black women. She is a Black woman, a graduate of Howard University. That said, she is Black with South Asian heritage, a multiracial presidential candidate in an increasingly multiracial world. Read more →

By Daniel Laurison | A lot of people who think deeply about American democracy, its flaws and its promise both, have ignored campaigns and the people who run them. So I want to explain why what happens inside campaigns, or in the heads and hearts of campaign professionals, is relevant to understanding American politics. Many political scientists assume that everyone in politics is acting in a fairly straightforward manner to maximize some obvious interest or utility for themselves—that is, they believe in the rational choice theory of human behavior. Read more →

By David R. Dow | For the second time in a generation, the Supreme Court has intervened in a political dispute it could have avoided. For the second time in a generation, the justices resolved that political dispute by dividing along ideological lines. For the second time in a generation, the Court squandered the only thing it has as the basis of its authority: the respect of the people, and the public’s perception that it is not merely another political institution. Read more →

By Jonathan Rosenblum | This spring’s university encampment protests represented a welcome step up in the Palestine solidarity movement. Now, as students leave campus for the summer, their activism is spawning a further escalation—one that holds tremendous promise for the US anti-war movement: worker strikes. Read more →

By Leigh Patel | Mainstream media’s coverage of the campus-based student protests and encampments across the globe primarily addresses the ‘need’ to use law enforcement, including university police and politicians’ calls for National Guard. Armed with riot gear which does not include mace, batons, firearms, or metal or rubber tie handcuffs, this armament has been firmly in place long before this student mobilization. Through phones and social media, the world watches as students’ encampments are forcibly assaulted and police officers, municipal and university, use blunt force to remove students and faculty from these sites of protests. Read more →

Frederick S. Lane | In my previous post, “The Napoleon of the Mailbags,” I talked about the enthusiasm of Christian nationalists for a re-invigoration of the 1873 Comstock Act. In the view of zealots like US District Court Judge Matthew Kaszmyrak (D. 19th Cent.), the law's long-dormant prohibition against the mailing of “(e)very article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion” amounts to a national ban of mifepristone and misoprostol, the two medications most commonly used to induce abortion. Read more →

A Q&A with Dr. OiYan Poon | I have been trying to write a book on Asian Americans and affirmative action since at least 2012. Each time I started, I couldn’t figure out who my intended audience was. As a result, my writing process kept stalling out. I was accustomed to writing for scholarly and technical audiences but had a hard time explaining things to wider audiences—people who are intelligent, curious, and civically engaged. Like many toddlers, my daughter started to ask a lot of questions when she became verbal. Read more →

By Howard Bryant | Americans have shown they can only discuss race within two frameworks: Things are better than they were or Get over it. So what exactly happened to the Heritage in the 1970s that began a nearly half-century slide into dormancy, when protest was transformed from noble to toxic? O. J. Simpson happened to it. Read more →

A Q&A with Amy Caldwell and Perpetua Charles | I’d worked with Ra Page, Atef Abu Saif’s editor at Comma Press in the UK, on a previous book, The Drone Eats with Me, which chronicled Abu Saif’s experiences on the ground in Gaza during the 2012 Israeli incursion. And then last fall, after the post-Oct 7 Israeli campaign and invasion of Gaza began, Ra reached out. I didn’t know Atef had been visiting Gaza on October 7, and it was, of course, distressing to hear. Read more →

By Frederick S. Lane | The name “Anthony Comstock” has been in the news a lot over the last few weeks. That’s really something of a surprise, given that Comstock died almost 109 years ago in his Summit, NJ, home. But he left behind a legacy of legislative and cultural activism that increasingly resonates with the country’s growing Christian nationalist movement.  Read more →

By Frederick S. Lane | For millennia, childless couples were told that their nurseries were empty because of “God's will,” or that it was “all in God’s plan.” Similarly, empty condolences were offered when infants or children died of preventable diseases, unsanitary conditions, unhealthy foods, or foreseeable negligence. Read more →

By Jonathan Rosenblum | Three years of rank-and-file Starbucks worker organizing has produced a historic union breakthrough: a commitment by the implacably anti-union company to bargain a national contract for 10,000 workers and negotiate a process for additional workers to organize. Remarkably, though, this victory came about in part because of a serendipitous boost from the Palestine justice movement. It’s proof of the power—and indeed, necessity—of international working-class solidarity in taking on today’s leading fights against the giants of capitalism. Read more →