The Venice Film Festival opened with red-carpet glamour, a film about tabloid power and a blunt argument over who the industry still permits to make high art.

The English-speaking left does not need to invent immigrant-worker organizing from scratch. It needs to recognize, join, and resource the networks already leading it.

Sangwoo Cho traces Ben Shapiro’s changing place in a conservative movement increasingly divided over Israel, media, and America First.

On Fidel Castro’s centenary, Cuba’s crisis exposes the distance between revolutionary memory and daily life.

From Spider-Man to MAGA, Sangwoo Cho examines why promises of restoration have become so persuasive across American culture and politics.

A close reading of Alabama’s prison crisis, and why a real solution must be measured by accountability, care, safety, and the lives inside the system.

A disputed World Cup suspension became a test of how FIFA protects the appearance and reality of independence when political power seeks access.

Daniel Ortega’s government is moving from controlling elections to eliminating them, revealing how authoritarian systems hollow out democracy before discarding it.

Two decades after Jon Stewart confronted Crossfire, political commentary has moved online, but its incentives still reward performance, outrage, and partisan theater.

India’s Cockroach Janta Party turned an insult against unemployed youth into a national movement demanding accountability for an examination system in crisis.

Look at the roster of the French national team. Then look at the history of French colonialism in West and North Africa. The connection between those two things is not coincidental. It is the entire story. France's ability to field one of the most competitive squads in the world in 2026 is inseparable from the migration patterns set in motion by its imperial history, the communities that formed in its cities as a result, and the young men who grew up in those communities drea

The Democratic Party has a Hakeem Jeffries problem. Not because Jeffries has done anything wrong, but because his position at the center of a fracturing coalition has made him the symbol of a debate that the party can no longer manage with careful language and calls for unity. Jeffries, if Democrats retake the House, would be the first Black speaker in history. Some members of his own party's insurgent wing are running against his allies and chanting at their victory parties

The United States turns 250 years old this week. The NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released July 1, 2026 asked Americans how they feel about that milestone. The results do not describe a nation in the mood for celebration. They describe a nation that is exhausted, divided, and deeply uncertain about whether the system it inherited is capable of delivering on what it promised. The poll is worth sitting with. Not because any single survey can capture the full complexity of what 330

Legacy admissions have become one of the most quietly debated features of American higher education. The conversation tends to flare up around Supreme Court decisions and admissions scandals, then fade. But the policy is still very much alive, and the students it displaces are real. The Where Legacy admissions exist in all states except California, Illinois, Maryland, Colorado, and Virginia. California and Maryland have enacted statewide bans covering both public and private

On January 1, 2026, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City. He is the first Muslim to hold that office. He is the first Asian American to hold that office. He is also a democratic socialist who represents a district in Queens and who ran on a platform that most political analysts, as recently as three years ago, would have described as unelectable in a major American city. The significance of this moment does not reduce to identity, though identity matters. The

The week of May 11 through May 17, 2026, produced a set of civil rights developments that, taken individually, each warranted serious coverage. Taken together, they describe something more alarming: a coordinated, sustained effort to weaken the federal government's role in protecting racial equality. Voting rights took a hit. DOJ enforcement activity against civil rights violations slowed. Immigration policing expanded in ways that civil rights organizations and international

Gas is $4.55 a gallon. The Pentagon has spent $25 billion in nine weeks. And the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil moves, is still closed.

Seven Republican state senators in Indiana voted against Trump's redistricting push. Now $7 million in outside spending is trying to end their careers. This is what political loyalty looks like in 2026.

Cole Allen walked into the most press-saturated room in Washington with a shotgun and two pistols. The story everyone covered was the shooting. The story fewer people covered is what it means for journalism.

The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's majority-Black district as an 'unconstitutional racial gerrymander.' The timing, right before the midterms, is not accidental.