ABSTRACT: In 2018, Garfield Hylton became a picker at Amazon’s BHX4 warehouse in Coventry, a city in the English Midlands. BHX4 is the first stop in a product’s journey through Amazon’s distribution network. It’s a holding facility close to ports and railyards; workers there break down bulk shipments to be distributed to fulfillment centers, where orders are stored, picked, packed, and shipped. Hylton was one of about 2,000 workers at the warehouse, supplying tens of millions of items each year to the United Kingdom and Europe.

Abstract: How should we look back at the history of the “sewer socialists” of Milwaukee? This question has taken on renewed urgency following the elections of Seattle’s Katie Wilson and New York City’s Zohran Mamdani, who has said that “the example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often.” Most historians of the left in the United States have regarded Milwaukee’s three socialist mayors as minor historical figures or neglected them altogether. But attention to the city’s history of socialism increased markedly with the rise of Bernie Sanders, himself a former socialist mayor, and even more so following the decision to hold the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee in August 2020.

ABSTRACT: Ethiopia’s Tigray, Sudan, Gaza. In the 2020s, civil wars and counterinsurgencies have caused death and displacement on a scale not seen since the Cold War. Yet the academic field dedicated to studying such wars has never been less relevant to their resolution. Conflict studies is the child of a bygone era: a world in which Western scholars studied wars in faraway places, and Western states intervened in those same wars.

Abstract: Since becoming mayor of Paris in 2014, Anne Hidalgo has transformed the city. Paris is greener, easier to cross on a bike, more pedestrian friendly. Large swaths of land that were once given over to cars are now open to people on foot, most notably the banks of the Seine. Parks have expanded, trees have been planted. Hidalgo has pushed forth a wide range of plans in order to fulfill her vision: new social homes, better healthcare, new monuments to women forgotten by history. Her push for social housing and against gentrification has won her praise around the world. This summer, the Seine opened up for public swimming, a decades-long project finally achieved.

ABSTRACT: The Silver Meteor pulls out of Miami’s Amtrak station on time at 8:10 a.m. It rumbles past the sun-bleached industrial landscape, and the large car window is lit up by the low-lying autumn rays. “Have a Safe and Productive Day” reads a squat white wall, directed at the train cars and framed by palm fronds and power lines. I do the opposite: close my laptop, close my book, and remember Robert Louis Stevenson’s words—“And ever again, in the wink of an eye, / Painted stations whistle by”—as my co-passengers and I zip past Hollywood, then Fort Lauderdale, then Deerfield Beach. The fluorescent lights illuminate an interior of scuffed vinyl and tired textiles, but extrawide seats and expansive windows make up for these deficiencies. I take out wool and needles and start to knit a vest, measuring the journey in centimeters of fabric; stations tick by in tidy rows of stitches.

ABSTRACT: Last summer, the Bronx was burning. In July, as a heatwave smothered the Eastern Seaboard, the temperature in New York City’s poorest borough reached a record-setting 100.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Extreme heat kills over 500 New Yorkers each summer, when crowded, shadeless neighborhoods become furnaces and pressure-cookers. No borough is more vulnerable to heat-related deaths than the Bronx, where residents—85 percent of whom are Black or Hispanic—suffer from higher rates of asthma and diabetes, are more likely to work outdoors, and have less air conditioning access than people living in other boroughs.

ABSTRACT: Americans learn about public lands in history class, but if you live east of the Mississippi, you probably haven’t thought about them much since. You might know about the Homestead Act, which encouraged westward expansion by allowing settlers to make claims on land and take ownership after five years of residence. You could possibly recall the Taylor Grazing Act or the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act, which together changed the government’s approach from disposal and privatization to holding and management. But unless you’ve recently gone on a Western road trip, you’re unlikely to have noticed that the federal government still owns more than a quarter of the land in this country and that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is the nation’s largest landlord, managing 10 percent of the land in the United States. You likely don’t know that drilling on public lands is responsible for about a quarter of U.S. carbon emissions.

Abstract: Zohran Mamdani first became visible to me and many others just over a year ago, when he posted a video where he spoke to working-class New Yorkers in the Bronx and Queens about why some of them voted for Donald Trump. In that video, which subsequently went viral, Mamdani swept aside the superficial argument about whether support for Trump was motivated by racial and xenophobic animus or economic anxiety. He simply asked people and listened to what they said. Mamdani advanced his mayoral candidacy on a few clear propositions demonstrated that day. Ordinary people are worried about their material and social standing as they try to build their lives in one of the most unequal and expensive cities in the world. “Affordability” has been Mamdani’s watchword ever since; he used it to ground a winning campaign. The essence of that campaign, however, grew from a more fundamental democratic insight: that politics begins by meeting people where they are, convincing them that you will listen to them, and building trust that you will stand for them and lead them to a better future.

ABSTRACT: “Socialism is the name of our desire,” Dissent’s founders stated in 1954. It was an ethical and moral demand, a compass rather than a map. It was a “vision,” they wrote, “that gives urgency to . . . criticism of the human condition in our time.” One purpose for Dissent was to rescue the idea of socialism from those who claimed it for authoritarian ends. And that points to a problem with our vocabulary. Across the globe, a few big concepts define political orientations: liberalism, socialism, capitalism. But each of these categories contains multiple meanings, including internally contradictory ones. There are struggles between ideological camps, of course, but there are also struggles within them over how to define these categories for the public. The ways that people understand the meaning of political words is, alas, derived less from the work of intellectual magazines and more from experiences with politicians who claim them.

Abstract: Nearly three decades have passed since the historian Mike Wallace published Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, cowritten with the late Edwin G. Burrows, to much renown. A second volume, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (written by Wallace alone), followed in 2017. With the publication of the third and final installment in this panoramic history, Gotham at War: A History of New York City from 1933 to 1945, it is possible both to view the project as a whole and to look afresh at one of the most transformative eras in the history of New York, the United States, and the world.