“The new schools in Gaza are private, and their scarcity drives up prices. I had to pay 300 shekels in registration fees, plus 170 shekels per month—a huge amount of money in Gaza, which most people can’t afford. Parents borrow money where they can to pay tuition fees.” A dispatch from Gaza:

Putting forward a theory of progress is not only a way of settling a theoretical dispute; it’s also a move with real stakes. As confidence in collective life wanes, progress can seem not merely unlikely but unthinkable. Maya Krishnan:

Fascism requires an enormous administrative state. That's the real significance of Project 2025 and the pivot it marked for the modern conservative movement. www.bostonreview.net/articles/ins...

The new schools in Gaza are private, and their scarcity drives up prices. Gaza journalist Rami Abu Jamous takes his son to the first day of kindergarten: www.bostonreview.net/articles/fir...

“From the outside, it may seem that life is returning to Gaza, but in fact, it is not life. It is only non-life that is beginning again. We cannot speak of life if the pillars of life—education, health, housing—are not in place.” A dispatch from Gaza by journalist Rami Abu Jamous:

I can share my previous skeets on the likes of Greenwood in Tulsa or Central Avenue in Tampa but suffice to say it’s a depressingly common story how African-American neighborhoods born of segregation were finished off by “urban renewal.” www.bostonreview.net/articles/bre...

Talk of progressive social change can sound like a fairy-tale or bedtime story: fictions we tell ourselves to feel better. What it would mean for progress to be something we could fight for? Maya Krishnan on Rahel Jaeggi’s PROGRESS AND REGRESSION:

“His victory against Andrew Cuomo, the former-governor-son-of-a-governor, shows how Democrats have finally arrived at their Tea Party moment: voters fed up with a hollowed-out Democratic Party registered their dissatisfaction, succeeding despite a torrent of propaganda from the establishment.”

Please subscribe to the Boston Review. www.bostonreview.net

Do yourself a favor and read this excellent wide-ranging interview with the activist-scholar Cathy Cohen!

“Staging hosts, @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social told me, ‘are giving our politics a home. . . and they are doing it by opening up their own. What these New Yorkers are showing time and time again is that they will provide the foundation for us to make the case directly to our neighbors.’”

“As Mamdani’s dramatic upset makes clear, his is the path forward: a robust, big-tent grassroots political organization that incorporates the populism rather than shutting it out and speaks to the needs of voters fed up with a sclerotic party establishment. It’s about damn time.”

Hard agree

"In claiming the mantle of science, the data-centered approach to politics has drawn ever tighter boundaries around what it takes to speak knowledgeably about politics and so in turn who can be entrusted to direct it." Lily Hu for @bostonreview.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

“As Mamdani’s dramatic upset makes clear, his is the path forward: a robust, big-tent grassroots political organization that incorporates the populism rather than shutting it out and speaks to the needs of voters fed up with a sclerotic party establishment. It’s about damn time.”

“His victory against Andrew Cuomo, the former-governor-son-of-a-governor, shows how Democrats have finally arrived at their Tea Party moment: voters fed up with a hollowed-out Democratic Party registered their dissatisfaction, succeeding despite a torrent of propaganda from the establishment.”

This is an important read.

“The incalculable damage left by Bush and Cheney’s day-in-and-day-out contempt for national and international law includes the power to sweep forward in time and trivialize into a matter of personal preference any future president’s adherence to the law.“ Elaine Scarry in 2008:

“Staging sites aren’t new to political campaigns, but they’ve never been done like this before.” In our latest, nia t. evans reports from NYC on the kitchen tables behind Mamdani’s kitchen-table strategy:

“The incalculable damage left by Bush and Cheney’s day-in-and-day-out contempt for national and international law includes the power to sweep forward in time and trivialize into a matter of personal preference any future president’s adherence to the law.“ Elaine Scarry in 2008:

Eric Foner has argued that the Reconstruction amendments so fundamentally changed the political order that they should be considered a “Second Founding.” What I like about that way of putting it is that it signals the possibility that we can do this again and again. — @ositanwanevu.com

This article is one of the more wonderful things I have ever read on Plato www.bostonreview.net/articles/pla...

Plato and the Poets The centuries-old debate should be settled: an intellectual world bereft of poetry is a damaged one. by Elaine Scarry www.bostonreview.net/articles/pla... Plato at PG: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/autho... #books #literature #philosophy

My essay – "What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Political Violence" – is in the new print issue of Boston Review. I hope you'll subscribe to what's unquestionably one of the best magazines, and perhaps the best political magazine, in the country. www.bostonreview.net/articles/wha...

“Staging hosts, @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social told me, ‘are giving our politics a home. . . and they are doing it by opening up their own. What these New Yorkers are showing time and time again is that they will provide the foundation for us to make the case directly to our neighbors.’”

Really interesting story about how Mamdani campaign used "staging hosts" to help scale canvassing work -- which had the added benefit of getting people to talk to each other www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

the major lessons of the Mamdani campaign are actually about organizing, not about social media, the candidate, or policies (although these last two are related)

"While loneliness and virtual life still reign supreme, the people I spoke to described the thrill of connecting with strangers, watching their toddlers play with canvassers, and coming home to find unexpected guests."

Imagine being so pumped about a candidate that you’d hand your house keys to strangers to use as a campaign site. We need more of these.

“Staging sites aren’t new to political campaigns, but they’ve never been done like this before.” In our latest, nia t. evans reports from NYC on the kitchen tables behind Mamdani’s kitchen-table strategy:

just read this powerful essay. I forgot who shared initially but made me think of this! (Re our safe keeping our institutions and universities &how the side of righteousness does not guarantee a win AND despite that we MUST continuously and actively choose it) www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

> Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. www.bostonreview.net/articles/hen...

Our new issue drops soon! @leaypi.bsky.social leads a forum on the real crisis fueling the war on immigrants, w/ @pochoaespejo.bsky.social @danieldenvir.bsky.social @daralind.bsky.social Plus @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social on civility under fascism, @davidaustinwalsh.bsky.social on MAGA’s complaints +

Sounds like we all need to subscribe to the Boston Review

Our new issue drops soon! @leaypi.bsky.social leads a forum on the real crisis fueling the war on immigrants, w/ @pochoaespejo.bsky.social @danieldenvir.bsky.social @daralind.bsky.social Plus @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social on civility under fascism, @davidaustinwalsh.bsky.social on MAGA’s complaints +

I wrote for @bostonreview.bsky.social about this after Mamdani’s upset win in the primary. The entire structure of the Democratic Party establishment in the 2010s revolved around deferring to powerful elites using the language of empowering the marginalized.

Yes. www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

“Not only is authoritarianism a real possibility in a rich and mature republic; we are seeing signs of its spread. Defeating it in any decisive fashion requires reckoning with the underlying trends that fuel it. It is no solution to defend a prior dispensation that led us straight here.”

“Since Trump won, Musk said, a majority wanted this, and their will ought to be done. First, Trump won only a plurality. But the idea that there is a kind of authoritative public—the real people, the white majority—that you shouldn’t contradict: that’s basically Herrenvolk democracy.”

"What is condemned as “violence” is not what kills or inflicts harm. It is what threatens oligarchic control or challenges national mythologies upon which established order depends."

“Sparring w/ the sun may well be the next stage of the slow violence of climate change…New technologies may buy us more time...But the very idea of “buying time” evokes a Plan B logic of opt-outs and buy-ins that betray the democratic idea of public things.” If they have a plan B, we need a plan A

“I’ve come to think of the Democratic Party as being more of a professional association for liberals than a real political party. There’s not this sense of excruciating mission that the Republicans and the right have.” Osita Nwanevu talks with @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social:

“The truth is that the ‘black revolution’ was never about those men who happened to have black skin… It was always about the dispossessed of the earth, about changing the terms of power itself, about creating new societies—not about inheriting the old.” www.bostonreview.net/articles/whe...

“@mattpolprof.bsky.social has emphasized the shared commitment across the U.S. right to the idea that human equality is a myth. But beyond this rejection of egalitarianism, the MAGA coalition does not have a consensus on who, precisely, is superior.” @davidaustinwalsh.bsky.social on those rifts:

On Inauguration Day 2017 I published The President’s House is Empty, an elegy to nearly disappeared public things through the prism of the office/holder. Now the White House is half destroyed. I suppose it is time for a eulogy instead. But there is a public option:

"Law in this instance has no more legitimacy than any political act. The longer we indulge the law over morality, the weaker our moral voice becomes. In time, we lose the ability to say, forthrightly, what the administration has done is murder for which they and their partisans should be ashamed."

“@mattpolprof.bsky.social has emphasized the shared commitment across the U.S. right to the idea that human equality is a myth. But beyond this rejection of egalitarianism, the MAGA coalition does not have a consensus on who, precisely, is superior.” @davidaustinwalsh.bsky.social on those rifts:

My latest for @bostonreview.bsky.social, where I look at the growing discontent and infighting within the MAGA coalition (h/t to Curt Mills of AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE and Matt McManus at Spelman College for sharing their insights with me!) www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

📆Weds 10/22 @ 6PM: Come see Elaine Scarry, Quinn Slobodian, and Brandon M. Terry discuss the "Boston Review" 50th anniversary issue "The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide"! They will be joined in conversation by Aziz Rana. Get tickets and info here: buff.ly/srT3sDu