Culture

Turning Abandoned Gold Mines Into Wheelchair Paths

How a motley alliance of hippies and hillbillies transformed a California mining town.

Stephanie Sauer

A Brief Case for Cancelling All Student Loan Debt

It isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s smart economics.

In These Times Editors

In Yellowstone, Heavy Lies the Stetson (on Kevin Costner’s Head)

Land disputes, water rights, Native sovereignty: Paramount’s new series could hardly be more relevant to today’s West.

Carson Vaughan

We’re Still Locking Up the Mentally Ill

When the only prescription is jail time.

Jude Ellison Sady Doyle

Zora Neale Hurston’s Lost Work Couldn’t Come at a Better Time

In Barracoon, published 58 years after her death, the Harlem Renaissance writer interviews the last known survivor of a slave ship.

Lauren Michele Jackson

What Noam Chomsky Got Right About NAFTA

In 1994, writing for In These Times, Noam Chomsky predicted the trade deal would cause “rural misery and a surplus of labor” and “the fading of meaningful and democratic processes.”

In These Times Editors

Universal Basic Income: A Primer

Here’s why everyone’s demanding free money from the government.

Dayton Martindale

A Middle America You’ll Never See in the Coastal Media

The micro-comics in John Porcellino’s From Lone Mountain show a way of life the media largely ignores.

Jessa Crispin

From Harriet Tubman to Black Panther

An artist speaks on heroism in the Black community.

Madiha Hussaini

An Ode to Sharp-Tongued Women, From Dorothy Parker to Susan Sontag

Michelle Dean’s new book Sharp profiles brilliant and creative women who fought sexism, but, by and large, did not identify with the feminist movement.

Laura Tanenbaum

Barbara Ehrenreich Calls BS on the Immortality Industry

In her new book, Natural Causes, the author reminds us that we can't cheat death -- although we can die trying.

Jane Miller

For Cowboy Poets, One Topic is Taboo

They love the land. But few at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering want to talk about how climate change is ravaging the West.

Carson Vaughan

How a 19th-Century Absurdist Playwright Accidentally Predicted Trump

Ubu Roi is newly relevant, thanks to our president.

Hannah Steinkopf-Frank

Can We Have ’90s Roseanne Back, Please?

We need the old Roseanne’s working-class heroism now more than ever. We're better off with the reruns than the reboot.

Kate Aronoff

Working Night and Day, for 1,000 Years

A new book tells the hidden history of work—on and off the job.

Joanna Scutts

A Brief Case for Guaranteed Housing

Why housing should be a human right.

Dayton Martindale

And the Oscar for Best Protest Goes To…

Awards show activism, then and now.

Joel Bleifuss

Portraitists with Disabilities Celebrate the History of Black Art

David A. Holt on his artistry and work with Project Onward, a studio and gallery for artists with disabilities.

Elena Sucharetza