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Ronald and Nancy Reagan smiling and waving at victory celebration.

Honey, I Forgot to Duck

Reagan’s capacity to inhabit and generate legend stemmed from his own impulse to substitute pleasing fictions for inconvenient facts.
Conference of Studio Unions' months-long strike against Hollywood studios in 1945.

How Hollywood’s Black Friday Strike Changed Labor Across America

A 1945 union vs. studios battle set off broad right-wing hysteria—its lessons should resonate today.
Barbie doll

Barbie and the Problem of Corporate Power

Stars of the movie about an iconic Mattel toy are on strike. Both the company’s history and Barbie’s plot illuminate how powerful corporations really are.
Colorful abstract art

The Writers’ Strike Opens Old Wounds

The deep roots of the latest WGA strike.
Prominent writers Billy Wilder and Gore Vidal (right and second from right) join a writers’ picket line at 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles, June 25, 1981. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

Hollywood Screenwriters Have Always Known That Moviemaking Is a Form of Labor

Stretching back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, writers and many others in the industry have fought for their rights as workers.
Ronald Reagan and his mother.

Ronald Reagan’s Guiding Light

Having inherited his mother’s beliefs, Reagan was ever faithful to the Disciples of Christ, whose tenets were often at odds with those of the GOP.
Trump and Reagan depicted as two halves of the same face.

The Dark Legacy of Reaganism

Conservatives might be tempted to hold up Reagan as representative of a nobler era. They’d be wrong.
A painting of a large camera on a film set, surrounded by green screens.

Casual Viewing

Why Netflix looks like that.
Starbucks workers on strike.

The Paradox of the American Labor Movement

It’s a great time to be in a union—but a terrible time to try to start a new one.
The Hollywood sign replaced with the words "The End."

The Life and Death of Hollywood

Film and television writers face an existential threat.
UAW workers at a strike event.

Revaluing the Strike

Rather than viewing strikes as a last-resort bargaining tactic, the labor movement must embrace them as engines of political transformation.
Disney strikers picketing the premiere of The Reluctant Dragon, Los Angeles, July 1941.

Storyboards and Solidarity

The current Hollywood strikes have a precedent in Disney’s golden age, when the company was a hothouse of innovation and punishing expectation.

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