To say that I’ve been following the Boston bombings case throughout the past week would be a considerable understatement. I’ve read every major and tangential article about it, often multiple times. I’ve rotated a slew of hashtags (#Watertown, #Bostonbombings, #Tsarnaev) …

My first understanding—I’m foreign, you see—of Martin Luther King Day came from Public Enemy’s “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” off Apocalypse 91. The “news announcement” at the start of the song suggests that “the powers that be in …

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Four years on, the heady idealism of 2008 makes me cringe …

It’s difficult to absorb every sound bite, every minutiae of the campaign trail, every talking head. I get that. The majority of us have but a few minutes of each day to allow ourselves to be invaded by the presidential …

Like many Americans, I spent the month of July, 2011 compulsively reading the news, oscillating between rage and despair as I watched the debt ceiling drama unfold. Political leaders sought to outbid one another, each of their proposals more draconian …

In her new book The Mansion of Happiness, the historian Jill Lepore claims that the debates Americans have over issues like abortion, stem cell research and end-of-life care, usually understood as having to do with science and religion alone, must …

Throughout most of the twentieth century both critics and defenders of capitalism believed that “another world was possible.” This alternative was generally called “socialism.” The Right condemned socialism as violating individual rights to private property and unleashing monstrous forms of …

The Occupy Wall Street movement is often held up as evidence that the Left is hostile to “the free market”—that the Left’s real goal is to protect all of us from the market’s brutal logic. The story goes like this: …

My grandfather was, for the greater part of his life, a communist. To few people might you have more aptly asked, with ample self-satisfaction at the delicious double meaning of the question, “excuse me, but what is the Left for?” …

Bill Ayers was a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago until 2010, and he has published several books on pedagogy, including Teaching Toward Freedom (2010) and To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher (2001). Before becoming …