Martin Wong, The Flood (1984)

FIREstorm

A conversation on the wave of landlord perpetrated arson in the Bronx during the 1970s.
Images of Lilli from the February 1956 cover of Spielzeug Export

My Search for Barbie’s Aryan Predecessor

The original doll was not made by Mattel but by a business that perfected its practice making plaster casts of Hitler.
A port city in the 1600s.

Sven Beckert’s Chronicle of Capitalism’s Long Rise

Capitalism is a global economic system, so a proper chronicle of its rise to dominance has to examine the entire world.
Jane Addams

Women's Work

How a century of undervaluing women’s labor echoes in policy today.
David Rubenstein looks toward the Washington Monument.

When Donald Trump Fired David Rubenstein

The private-equity billionaire spent decades building influence in the capital. Then his philanthropy collided with the president.
Man setting out a placard, on the cover of the book "Make Your Own Job"

Make Your Own Job

A new book examines Americans' long obsession with the enticing and oppressive concept of entrepreneurship.
"Wages for housework" posters: statue of liberty holding a broom and money, and an iron burning pants and the phrase "strike while the iron is hot."

The Care Factory

In the decades since the Wages for Housework movement, care work has become a site of profit in ways its leaders could never have predicted.
Workers for the Insular Lumber company felling a small Almon
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The Mythical Mahogany that Helped Build the American Empire

How “Philippine mahogany” became America’s tropical timber of choice, thanks to a rebrand from a colonial logging company that drove deforestation.
Friedrich A. Hayek gold coin

Goldbugs

How a fringe libertarian belief in monetary collapse inspired a 1970s literature of survivalism.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin in front of Google's servers.

The Future of Search: Will We Still Google It?

Google grew from a Stanford project into a $3T tech giant, pioneering search, data scaling, and AI, now challenged by regulation and chatbots.

The Progress Paradox

Neoliberals long preached that markets and technology reinforce each other. In reality, when one develops, the other tends to stagnate.
A mural of Milton S. Hershey, the founder of The Hershey Company.

What Hershey’s Century-Old Philanthropy Reveals About OpenAI’s New $130 Billion Foundation

The parallels between two American nonprofits that control major for-profit corporations.
Edmund Fitzgerald ship on the water.

What the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald Can Teach Us Fifty Years Later

Fitzgerald sank in a 1975 storm; Lightfoot’s song made it iconic. The wreck came to symbolize the Midwest’s industrial decline.
A billboard advertising nice homes while hiding the dilapidated state of the homes behind it.

American Suburbs Have a Financial Secret

Municipal bonds have become an unavoidable part of local governance—and their costs divide rich towns from poor ones.
The Holland Tunnel under construction (1923).

What Makes Cities Go BANANA?

New York City NIMBYism, restrictive zoning, and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s "Abundance."
'A slave auction at the South' by Theodore R. Davis, from Harper’s Weekly, July 1861

Speculation in Human Property

The survival of slave trading during the Civil War suggests that enslaved people remained valuable commodities in a time of economic upheaval.
Charles Garland with his wife and dog in 1921.

When the Tax Code Nudged Americans Toward Nonviolence

Chronicling the influence of the American Fund for Public Service.
A far-right meme featuring Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Ludwig von Mises

From the Cesspool to the Mainstream

New fusionist intellectuals are the missing link between nineteenth-century race science, twentieth-century libertarianism, and the contemporary alt-right.
Food stand at a carnival advertising a wide ranging menu.

Why an Abundance of Choice Is Not the Same as Freedom

It’s only in recent history that freedom has come to mean having a huge array of choices in life. Did we take a wrong turn?
A mule carrying packs sits defiantly, while one man pushes, another pulls, and a third cracks a whip.

Mule Power

Unpacking empires and diaspora in Mexico and the United States.
Charles Mitchell

The Lesson of 1929

Debt is the almost singular through line behind every major financial crisis.
Donald Trump in a gold hardhat poses with construction workers at the Trump Palace.

How the Capitalism of the 1980s Created Donald Trump’s Theory of the State

The proliferation of privately held companies during the Reagan years laid the foundations for Trump’s approach to government.
Front entrance of the New York Stock Exchange building reflected in a modern glass building.

The A.I. Boom and the Spectre of 1929

As some financial leaders fret publicly about the stock market falling to earth, a new book recounts the greatest crash of them all.
Screen shots and captions from a public service campaign about the economy.

The Ad Campaign for Capitalism

In the 1970s, corporate America struck back at the forces attempting to rein it in. One of their tactics was a public service announcement.
Illustration of Karl Marx in front of map of the United States.

The Triumphs and Travails of American Marxism

Karl Marx never visited the United States, but he and his ideas left an imprint nonetheless.
Poop emojis against a yellow backdrop.

Brown Stage Capitalism

Cory Doctorow’s ‘Enshittification’ describes how tech platforms (and everything else) went down the sewer. Hint: It rhymes with ‘deshmegulation.’
Milton Friedman (left) in 1978.

Freedom and the State in Thomas Sowell’s America

Tracing Thomas Sowell’s shift from Marxism to the Chicago school of economics.

America’s Greatest Mistake

Globalization left millions behind as a policy and transformed the world politically, a new book argues.
Firefighter fighting the Thomas fire in 2017.

The Disasters ‘High-Risk’ Insurance Fails to Paper Over

From the Watts Riots to 2025 wildfires, California’s FAIR Plan has stood in the way of transformative change.
Nervous stock traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 2008.
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The 2008 Financial Crisis Explained: Housing Bubble to Bailout

Risky loans, regulatory gaps, and Wall Street practices fueled the 2008 financial crisis and led to the Great Recession.