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April 4, 2018, marked the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death. This collection grapples with his enduring legacy. Though he is widely celebrated as a national hero—martyr to an inspiring dream about our country’s largest possibilities—many younger Americans now greet his name with suspicion, viewing him as an essentially conservative figure. These essays offer critical engagement in place of canonization, recovering—and scrutinizing—the profoundly radical nature of King’s political, moral, and religious thought.

A sober assessment of AI today, and a bold vision for what it could be.

Generative AI tools, released by a handful of rich tech companies, are remaking the economy, society, and human life as we know it. Must their vision be our common destiny?

Leading a forum, acclaimed technology writer Evgeny Morozov—author of To Save Everything, Click Here and host of the podcast A Sense of Rebellion—takes a hard look at Silicon Valley’s grip on our technological imagination. The prevailing wisdom says we can be complacent realists—erecting a few guardrails around Big Tech—or else total refuseniks, rejecting this new technology altogether. That false choice runs roughshod over history, Morozov argues—and with it a more utopian vision of the role technology can play in our lives.

To sketch a better AI future, Morozov takes us back to the past, showing how a radically different way of thinking about artificial intelligence once flourished before losing out to Cold War militarization, consumerism, and venture capital. That more humane vision can still be won, but it requires being clear-eyed about the obstacles. Only by building political power, Morozov concludes, can we wrench control of AI from Silicon Valley and build a technological future that serves us all. Forum respondents include musician Brian Eno, computer scientist and AI pioneer Terry Winograd, free software activist and former digital minister of Taiwan Audrey Tang, technologist Bruce Schneier, writer and software engineer Wendy Liu, and journalist Edward Ongweso Jr..

Also in this issue: Joelle M. Abi-Rached on exploding pagers in Beirut and Israel’s expanding war; Sophia Goodfriend on the military’s embrace of the new AI; Lily Hu on the political theory of algorithms; Alexander Hartley on copyright after ChatGPT; Terry Nguyen on the work of literature in the age of large language models; and more.

How do we know who is on our side? Is it possible for someone who is not like us to share our same hopes? Can links forged by empathy or mutual interest match those created by shared experience? What can we gain from alliances that we cannot achieve on our own?

These are difficult questions to answer even in intimate settings, and more so in arenas of cultural and political struggle. Through original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism from renowned writers and newcomers, Allies will offer indispensable insights into issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal. Drawing on the prophetic power of the imagination to conjure both the possible dangers and life-giving possibilities of alliances—be they political, private (such as marriage), therapeutic, or even aesthetic (between readers and writers, for example)—Allies will be indispensable reading for our times.

It is rare now for people to stay where they were raised, and when we encounter one another—whether in person or, increasingly, online—it is usually in contexts that obscure if not outright hide details about our past. But even in moments of pure self-invention, we are always shaped by the past. In Ancestors, some of today’s most imaginative writers consider what it means to be made and fashioned by others. Are we shaped by grandparents, family, the deep past, political forebears, inherited social and economic circumstances? Can we choose our family, or is blood always thicker? And looking forward, what will it mean to be ancestors ourselves, and how will our descendants remember us?

Despite decades of activism and scientific consensus about the perils of climate change, our economies remain deeply dependent on fossil fuels. How are we to meet the challenge of global warming before it is too late? Climate Action asks what we must do to begin realizing a green future today.
Leading off a forum, Charles Sabel and David G. Victor argue that global climate change diplomacy—from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the 2015 Paris Agreement—has monopolized policy thinking but failed to deliver significant results. Instead, the authors suggest we must embrace what they call “experimentalist governance.” Taking inspiration from the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey as well as from the Montreal Protocol’s successful approach to another environmental crisis—ozone depletion—they contend that deep decarbonization of the economy can only be achieved by integrating bottom-up, local experimentation and top-down, global cooperation.
Respondents consider how that program might work in practice, where it fits alongside plans for a Green New Deal, and what political forces climate action must reckon with. Other contributors explore the limitations of carbon pricing, the prospects of recent corporate commitments to rein in emissions, and the nature of life on a polluted and overheated planet. Together they sketch an urgent vision for climate action—now.

Economics After Neoliberalism offers a powerful case for a new brand of economics—one focused on power and inequality and aimed at a more inclusive society.

Three prominent economists—Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik, and Gabriel Zucman—lead off with a vision “for economic policy that stands as a genuine alternative to market fundamentalism.” Expanding on “the state of creative ferment” they describe, Boston Review has commissioned responses to their essay from economists, philosophers, political scientists, and policymakers across the political spectrum as well as new essays that challenge the current shape of markets and suggest more democratic alternatives.

“All history,” writes Maximillian Alvarez in his contribution to this issue, “is the history of empire—a bid for control of that greatest expanse of territory, the past.” Evil Empire confronts these histories head-on, exploring the motivations, consequences, and surprising resiliency of empire and its narratives.

Contributors grapple with the economic, technological, racial, and rhetorical elements of U.S. power and show how the effects are far-reaching and, in many ways, self-defeating. Drawing on a range of disciplines—from political science to science fiction—our authors approach the theme with imagination and urgency, animated by the desire to strengthen the fight for a better future.

This collection of new fiction, essays, and interviews—including celebrated authors Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, Maureen McHugh, and Charlie Jane Anders—conjures visions of political, environmental, and gender dystopias. Some stretch the imagination; others feel uncomfortably possible. Such stories look toward the future, but they also offer readers a new perspective on the crises of our time.

In the era of Trump, resurgent populism, catastrophic inequality, and climate change, this collection raises vital questions about political and civic responsibility. If we have, as Junot Díaz says, reached peak dystopia, then Global Dystopias might just be the handbook we need to weather the storm.

What does a just world look like? This volume begins with a planet beset by accumulating crises—environmental, social, and political—and imagines how we can move beyond them.

Drawing on the legacy of post-colonial struggles for liberation, Imagining Global Futures explores a range of radical visions for a world after neoliberalism and empire. Centered on movements in the Global South, the collection challenges dominant patterns of social and political life and sketches more just and sustainable futures we might build in their place. How can we build a world where people are both freer and more equal? An urgent resource for collective imagination, Imagining Global Futures counterposes thick visions of a better world to our dystopian present.

Equal opportunity is a widely shared ideal. As Joe Biden put it in his first executive order as president, “equal opportunity is the bedrock of American democracy.”

But is equal opportunity enough? Does it truly capture the meaning of equality? In a neoliberal age that prizes personal responsibility and individual merit, the ideal has been increasingly called into question. Taking equality seriously, critics argue, means aiming to ensure that we all live equally flourishing lives—not merely that we have equal shots at upward mobility. That means rethinking a range of social institutions, from education and land ownership to finance and neighborhood development. Featuring work by philosophers and economists, historians and sociologists, this issue explores the importance of outcomes, not just opportunities.

“Rural spaces,” writes Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, “are often thought of as places absent of things, from people of color to modern amenities to radical politics. The truth, as usual, is more complicated.”

With activists, historians, and political scientists as guides, Left Elsewhere explores the radical politics of rural America—its past, its priorities, and its moral commitments—that mainstream progressives overlook. This volume shows how these communities are fighting, and winning, some of the left’s biggest battles. From novel health care initiatives in the face of the opioid crisis to living wages for teachers, these struggles do not fall neatly into the “puny language,” as Rev. William Barber says, of Democrat or Republican. Instead they help us rethink the rural–urban opposition at the heart of U.S. politics. The future of the left, this collection argues, could be found elsewhere.

Anger looms large in our public lives. Should it?

Reflecting on two millennia of debates about the value of anger, Agnes Callard contends that efforts to distinguish righteous forms of anger from unjust vengeance, or appropriate responses to wrongdoing from inappropriate ones, are misguided. What if, she asks, anger is not a bug of human life, but a feature—an emotion that, for all its troubling qualities, is an essential part of being a moral agent in an imperfect world? And if anger is both troubling and essential, what then do we do with the implications: that angry victims of injustice are themselves morally compromised, and that it might not be possible to respond rightly to being treated wrongly? As Callard concludes, “We can’t be good in a bad world.”

The contributions that follow explore anger in its many forms—public and private, personal and political—raising an issue that we must grapple with: Does the vast well of public anger compromise us all?

On Solidarity clarifies a key idea in struggles for a more just world. What does solidarity mean, and how can diverse movements build enough of it to change society?

Organizer and political theorist Mie Inouye leads a forum on obstacles to collective actiontoday. Rejecting the language of “allyship” and the politics of deference, she makes the case for maintaining solidarity through conflict in durable institutions over time, none of which is possible without the hard work of good organizing. With responses from activists and theorists—from Astra Taylor and Sarah Schulman to Charisse Burden-Stelly, Jodi Dean, and Juliet Hooker—the forum helps us think about what solidarity is and what it requires.

Also in this volume, Simon Torracinta shows how a universal basic income can pave the way toa more solidaristic society, Judith Levine considers how films have portrayed solidarity among women in the face of abortion restrictions, Gaiutra Bahadur suggests terrain for Black-Asian solidarities, and Mariame Kaba, Kelly Hayes, and Dan Berger offer key lessons from the world of organizing.

What can technology do for feminism?

Almost fifty years ago, Shulamith Firestone imagined it could liberate women from the work of reproduction—so long as it was conceived as part of a cultural revolution. This collection casts a critical eye on the promises and the perils, asking not just whether an emancipatory feminism is possible today, but also what it might look like.

What do we owe each other as members of a democratic society? Public goods—from clean water to health care to schools—are under siege in the United States, with access too often restricted by class and race. Against this background, Trump’s nearly empty White House symbolizes the crisis we face: our increasing abandonment of the idea of the public. At stake is not only what we owe to each other but who we are.

Known around the world for challenging mainstream economics, economist Mariana Mazzucato believes, as the Financial Times writes, that “the public sector can and should be a cocreator of wealth that actively steers growth to meet its goals.” In Public Purpose: Industrial Policy’s Comeback and Government’s Role in Shared Prosperity, she calls on governments to create the economies we need today.

Mazzucato’s challenge leads off a debate on the revival of industrial policy—roughly defined as deliberate government action to shape the economy. Industrial policy has fallen out of favor in recent decades as economists defer to free markets to produce innovation and growth. Yet today, thinkers across the political spectrum have begun expressing new interest in industrial policy as a way to address the most serious problems of our times: from national security and climate change, to the market’s underfunding of public goods, to sluggish economic growth and labor market dysfunction.

Public Purpose makes a compelling case for industrial policy—what it is, and why we need it now. Addressing investment, innovation, supply chains, and growth, it provides a robust vision of a renewed industrial policy, and what it can offer the US economy in the face of climate change and a global pandemic.

Walter Johnson, Harvard historian and author of the acclaimed River of Dark Dreams, urges us to embrace a vision of justice attentive to the history of slavery—not through the lens of human rights, but instead through an honest accounting of how slavery was the foundation of capitalism, a legacy that continues to afflict people of color and the poor. Inspired by Cedric J. Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, as well as Black Lives Matter and its forebears—including the black radical tradition, the Black Panthers, South African anti-apartheid struggles, and organized labor—contributors to this volume offer a critical handbook to racial justice in the age of Trump.

Racist Logic tackles how racist thinking can be found in surprising—and often overlooked—places. In the forum’s lead essay, historian Donna Murch traces the origins of the opioid epidemic to Big Pharma’s aggressive marketing to white suburbanites. The result, Murch shows, has been to construct a legal world of white drug addiction alongside an illicit drug war that has disproportionately targeted people of color.

Other essays examine how the global surrogacy industry incentivizes the reproduction of whiteness while relying on the exploited labor of women of color, how black masculinity is commodified in racial capitalism, and how Wall Street exploited Caribbean populations to bankroll U.S. imperialism.

Racist logic, this issue shows, continues to pervade our society, including its nominally colorblind business practices. Contributors not only explore the institutional structures that profit from black suffering, but also point the way to racial justice.

“A curious thing has happened within American culture,” Aziz Rana writes. “The language of freedom has been claimed almost entirely by the political right.” Can it be reclaimed?

Freedom has a dual legacy. On the one hand, it stands for the great struggles long associated with the left, from abolition and anticolonialism to women’s and queer liberation. On the other hand, it has long been the watchword of an exclusionary right—playing a central role in the politics of neoliberalism and resurgent white nationalism. Rejecting this view of freedom as an exclusively right-wing concern, this issue reclaims freedom as a fundamental political value essential to any vision of a more just world.

Aziz Rana leads a forum on the path to a different politics of freedom. In the United States, he argues, reactionary uses of freedom at home have been emboldened by U.S. imperial power abroad. But the language of freedom can be genuinely liberating by building emancipatory institutions of collective agency and self-rule. Featuring eleven respondents—including Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jefferson Cowie, political theorists Adom Getachew, Lea Ypi, and Nancy Hirschmann, and philosophers Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Philippe Van Parijs—the forum clarifies how both political messaging and institution building are essential to extending real freedom to all.

Including essays on the legacy of Cold War liberalism, fifty years of liberation theology, violence in Israel/Palestine, and the Stop Cop City movement; reviews of M. E. O’Brien’s Family Abolition, Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s After Work, and Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy; an interview on Black existentialism; and prose poetry.

Artificial intelligence will not create superintelligence anytime soon. But it is already making huge advances—revolutionizing medicine and transport, transforming jobs and markets, and reshaping the fabric of social life. At the same time, the promises of AI have been increasingly overshadowed by its perils, from automation and disinformation to powerful new forms of bias and surveillance. Reckoning with these threats to work, democracy, and justice, Redesigning AI asks what can be done to redirect AI for the good of everyone.

Leading off a forum, economist and best-selling author Daron Acemoglu argues that though the challenges are dire, the future is not inevitable. Respondents debate the precise role new technology plays in economic inequality, the wide range of algorithmic harms facing workers and citizens, and other concrete steps that can be taken to ensure a just future for AI. Other contributors explore the impact of new technology in domains from medicine to carework, the nature of skills training in a rapidly changing economy, and the ethical case for not building certain forms of AI in the first place. Together they sketch an urgent vision for redirecting the course of technological change for good.

We bear deep wounds, individually and collectively. All have been worsened by a period of destructive politics that left us ill-equipped to respond to a global health catastrophe. As we struggle to recover our footing and grieve our dead, we believe that the arts must have a voice in the conversation about how we heal.

This anthology draws together a wide range of artists and thinkers, established and emerging. In essays, memoir, poetry, fiction, and comics, contributors explore what it might look like to repair. Topics include the Salem witch trials, climate catastrophe, the January 6 siege of the Capitol, gender identity, the failures (and hope) of Western medicine, and the entwined horrors of racial, sexual, and colonial violence.

No single text in this volume offers a definitive answer for what it means to repair. But together, they reveal a promising vision for where to go from here.

A conservative Supreme Court is poised to roll back many progressive achievements, from affirmative action to abortion. In the forum that opens Rethinking Law, legal scholars Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath argue that the left must stop thinking of the law as separate from politics. Instead, we must recover a lost progressive vision, a “democracy of opportunity,” that sees the public—not the judiciary—as the ultimate arbiter of what the Constitution means.

Offering a nuanced picture of the relationship between law and politics, other essays in Rethinking Law further explore the meaning of law beyond the Constitution and the courts. They look to social movements, including civil rights and LGBTQ rights, for lessons about social transformation. While contributors debate the limits of law in a vastly unequal society, they agree that it remains an essential resource for building a more just world.

What might happen if a woman’s right to vote is seen as coequal with her right to be elected?

Why are other countries so much better than the United States at electing women to office? In her lead essay in this anthology, Jennifer Piscopo argues that women in the United States haven’t fought for the right to be elected. A comparative political scientist, she shows that suffrage movements around the world often focused not only on the right to vote, but also the right to stand for office. As a result, when these movements succeeded, they saw the right to be elected as a positive right, enabling nationwide-efforts to both encourage and actively recruit female candidates. In her exploration of positive and negative rights in the United States, Piscopo explores what might happen if a woman’s right to vote is seen as coequal with her right to be elected, considering, among other things, how our definitions of representational government could both change and restore public trust in democracy.

How can the speculative imagination help us build a better world?

At a world-historical moment of global upheaval, speculative writing is enjoying a renaissance. This collection of poetry, stories, and essays engages speculation as both a ubiquitous feature of financial capitalism and a radical tool of collective imagination. By rejecting dominant ideas about what is possible, speculation empowers us to plot new paths to a more just world.

Creative works range over violence and healing, memory and erasure, and alternative worlds, while essays span the meaning of land and community in the African diaspora, Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction, and the ethics of the far future. Taken together, these works suggest that speculation is ultimately about our relationships with each other—as one contributor puts it, “what they have been, what they are, and most important, what they could be.”

Efforts to green the economy and distribute wealth more equitably often sound like a program for joyless lives: make do with less and give up your pleasures. To philosopher Kate Soper, this gets it all wrong. Leading this issue’s forum, she urges that we see “post-growth living” as an opportunity for greater pleasure, not less. A simpler life of “alternative hedonism”—built around local community and abun­dant free time—could make us happier and healthier while giving our overextended planet a new lease on life. Forum respondents, including Green New Deal economist Robert Pollin and Kenyan activist Nanjala Nyabola, embrace Soper’s call to remake society but question her prescription. The result is a wide-ranging debate about the limitations of lifestyle critique, the value of economic growth, and the kinds of alternatives that are possible.

Other contributions focus on the connections between pleasure and gender, including the joys of collective action and care work, the ordinary pleasures of Black motherhood, the misogyny of Pos­itive Psychology, and the links between good sex and democracy. Together they imagine what it will take to make a pleasurable life possible for everyone.

Donald Trump is back in the White House. Boston Review issue Trump’s Return explores how he got there, what’s next, and how to resist, featuring David Austin Walsh, Robin D. G. Kelley, Noura Erakat, Marshall Steinbaum, Jeanne Morefield, and more.

Walsh takes us inside Trump’s motley coalition of tech billionaires and “America First” nativists, examining its crackups and assessing its strength. With the right’s strategy of anti-“wokeness” now effectively spent, will these alliances hold? Steinbaum reads Bidenomics in light of the long arc of Democrats’ economic policy since the Great Recession, finding that it neglected the biggest problem: inequality. And Morefield exposes the lie at the heart of MAGA’s “invasion” narrative about the fentanyl crisis, showing how decades of bipartisan fixation on enemies abroad—and denial of the exceptional savagery of capitalism at home—have led to this moment.

Looking forward, Erakat follows the imperial boomerang from Palestine as it deepens political repression in the United States; Kelley plots a revival of class solidarity as the only path to durable and meaningful resistance; plus more on the colossal scale of money in politics, the labor vote, and the promises and perils of progressive federalism.

The issue also includes Gianpaolo Baiocchi on lessons from Lula’s extraordinary success in building a workers’ party in Brazil, Joelle M. Abi-Rached on the trauma of political violence and Syria’s future after the fall of Assad, Aaron Bady on the right’s resurgent natalism and liberal panic about falling birthrates, and Samuel Hayim Brody on the reality of settler colonialism and the mystifications of Adam Kirsch.

Nearly two years into a global pandemic, uncertainty has profoundly unsettled both our personal and political lives. Some of its sources are epistemic: How long will vaccine immunity last? Do rising prices threaten economic recovery? Others are sharply existential: How will I pay rent next month? Will I see my loved one again? At no other moment in the twenty-first century has there been such widespread unease about what the future holds.

Uncertainty is perhaps never more consequential than where it intersects with political power. Leading this issue’s forum, Sheila Jasanoff, pioneering scholar of science and technology studies, argues that public policy could benefit from a much more serious acknowledgment of uncertainty. In place of the hubris of technocratic expertise, Jasanoff calls for “technologies of humility”—institutional mechanisms, including greater citizen participation, for incorporating a wider range of experience and views in our schemes of democratic governance. Respondents to Jasanoff consider other causes of pandemic mismanagement and ask whether humility is the best response.

Can the nation-state serve social justice? Should social movements work inside or outside the state? What would a just state look like, and how can we get there?
Leading a forum in the latest issue of Boston Review, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò identifies fossil capital as the principal obstacle to a more just world. We face an uphill battle against carbon’s capture of the state system, he argues, but state politics remains our best path forward. Respondents—Thea Riofrancos, Mariame Kaba & Andrea Ritchie, Ishac Diwan & Bright Simons, Martin O’Neill & Joe Guinan, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Claudio Lomnitz, and Tara Raghuveer—explore the strategies, possibilities, and limitations of efforts to address the climate crisis and transform the state in the image of justice.
Elsewhere in the issue, Leila Farsakh examines the history and fate of the quest for Palestinian statehood, while Joshua Craze reports on the global rise of militias that vie for power with the states that created them. Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix make the case for a “solidarity state” premised on participation, parity, pluralism, and peace. Janice Fine and Hana Shepherd take us inside a compelling new model of labor law enforcement that is reshaping state and local governments across the country. And Bonnie Tenneriello documents the way prisons neutralize reform, following hard-won legislation to end solitary confinement that has done no such thing.
Plus, Richard Pithouse talks with S’bu Zikode, leader of the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement, about how South Africa’s poorest citizens are doing thirty years after apartheid; Jonathan S. Blake reviews recent books by Philip Pettit, Charles S. Maier, and Natasha Wheatley; and Peter E. Gordon traces the rise and fall of theory’s engagement with “real questions of suffering and social transformation.”

In an age of record-breaking superstorms and environmental degradation, this collection of poetry seeks to make sense of how we interact with and are influenced by nature. But the poems in What Nature were not written on Walden Pond. If they are a far cry from last century’s nature poetry, it is because “nature” today is a far cry from sanctuary or retreat.

As automation and the decline of manufacturing fuel fears of a coming age of mass unemployment, basic income—a government cash grant given unconditionally to all—has won wide support across the ideological spectrum, from Silicon Valley to labor. This issue asks what to make of such strange bedfellows. Some extol basic income’s merits, not only as a salve for financial precarity, but as a path toward racial justice and equality. Others caution that we must not forget to fight for the power of workers and the quality of work. Together these voices offer a nuanced debate about what it takes to tackle inequality and what kind of future we should aim to create.