The Left Archives - Public Seminar

The Left

Publishing and Publics

Discussing the realities of political journalism in 2026

April 1, 2026 • by Natalie Adler, Hira Ahmed, Natasha Lennard, Edward Ongweso Jr, Matt Peterson, Nick Pinto and Colin Vanderburg

Friday the thirteenth felt like a fitting day to gather a group of independent writers and editors for a discussion on the current state of political publishing. On February 13, Natasha Lennard, Intercept columnist and Associate Director for the New School for Social Research’s Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism (CPCJ) MA program joined Matt ...

History

Honest Truths From Wrongful Deaths

In an excerpt from Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, the author surveys how left-wing intellectuals responded to 9/11

December 3, 2025 • by Jeremy Varon

The first war the United States fought following 9/11, I argue, was a “war of interpretation” over the root causes and deep meaning of the attacks themselves. Below is a section from the first chapter of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War (University of Chicago Press, 2025), in ...

Politics

The Left Needs a Better Defense of Trans People

Stop emphasizing population size and start talking policy

April 24, 2025 • by Amelia Nonemacher

In the opening months of the Trump administration, the full power of the state has been deployed to suppress the rights of trans people to access healthcare, play sports, change their gender marker on official documents, and use public bathrooms, among other attacks. These policies have been critiqued by LGBTQ+ ...

The Left Needs a Better Defense of Trans People

Economy

Honduras Fights Back Against Global Oligarchy

How an unregulated techno-utopia came into existence and continues to sabotage a nation’s sovereignty

March 17, 2025 • by Nolan Young

Honduras money, financial business concept, banknotes and coins (2024) I Andrzej Rostek / Stutterstock ...

Democracy

An Open Letter to Kamala Harris

When silence is not an option

February 13, 2025 • by Melvin L. Rogers

On the final night of the Democratic National Convention in August 2024, Vice President Harris delivered what was meant to be a defining speech of her career. Accepting her party’s nomination, she did more than make the case for her presidency—she sounded the alarm. “With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting ...

Activism

What Democrats Lose in Ignoring the Uncommitted Movement

The party has learned the wrong lessons from 1968

October 24, 2024 • by Abby Lloyd

In anticipation of the Uncommitted National Movement’s arrival at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, press and political commentators made frequent reference to the anti-war protests turned police riots of the 1968 convention. It had been more than 50 years since internal discord among Democrats had been organized into an electoral ...

What Democrats Lose in Ignoring the Uncommitted Movement

Philosophy

Ideology After Marxism

From Karl Mannheim and Daniel Bell to Vaclav Havel

June 10, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

Among the many reckonings of [the twentieth century] was a reckoning, not merely with Marxism—but with the process of ideology-making itself....

Politics

The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the Dangers of Success)

Considering the triumph, and questionable uses, of the theory since the Vietnam War

June 10, 2024 • by Michael Walzer

All of us in the antiwar camp suddenly began talking the language of just war—though we did not know that that was what we were doing....

The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the Dangers of Success)

Europe & Central Asia

The French Politics of the Pantheon and the Monumental Hypocrisy of Emmanuel Macron

How recognizing the heroism of past immigrants serves as cover for a nation’s anti-immigrant present

April 8, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor

It was striking that a center-right president like Emmanuel Macron, who has recently hardened his position on immigrants and immigration, would grant such a high honor to two immigrant Communists. ...

The French Politics of the Pantheon and the Monumental Hypocrisy of Emmanuel Macron

Interviews

Artists Against Colonels

In Shades of Resistance, unexceptional people take exceptional risks

December 5, 2023 • by Joseph Matthews and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

Joseph Matthews and Evangeline Riddiford Graham chat about using fiction to unravel fascism, and why the “regime of the colonels” found the Greek underground counteroffensive of poetry and music so difficult to control....

History

The Blast

An excerpt from a new novel about the radical Left in 1916 San Francisco

May 18, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews

Adding to the cannery women’s travails was their invisibility to—the willful blindness of—the city’s traditional labor unions. The women had no specific skills, the labor leaders would say when pressed, and did not fit any particular craft or trade union, so their requests to the central labor council for some ...

Migration

Breaking the ‘Otherness’ Fixation

Diversity is held at the pinnacle of progressive thought, but full inclusion is far from becoming a reality

May 25, 2021 • by Halleh Ghorashi

_____ I arrived in the Netherlands as an asylum seeker in 1988. In Iran, I had been active in a revolution that later became an Islamic revolution. I felt connected to leftist movements all over the world, and the idea of international solidarity gave me strength and hope for the future. With ...