Jacobin

In recent years, renters’ unions have played an increasingly prominent role in a number of countries, with tenants’ groups exerting influence on national discussion and to some extent on the policies of governments and political parties. Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Scotland have all implemented some form of rent control since 2021. Against that backdrop, several writers have sought to combine the questions of political strategy raised by tenant struggles with the political economy of housing.

South Koreans tend to memorialize the tragedies of their modern history by date. The Korean War is 6.25 for June 25, 1950, the day it broke out; the Gwangju Uprising is 5.18, for May 18, 1980, when a ten-day popular revolt began before the military drowned it in blood. The same kind of shorthand exists elsewhere in East Asia — 6.4 for the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 and 3.11 for the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 — but nowhere is it as deeply embedded in collective memory as in South Korea.

Interview by Roman Broszkowski Providence, Rhode Island, ranks nationally as one of the least affordable cities for renters; a 2025 Redfin report placed the city of just under two hundred thousand residents on par with New York City in terms of rent cost relative to the median renter’s income. Unlike New York, however, Providence does not have rent stabilization laws that limit the amount landlords can raise rents on a portion of the rental housing stock.

Paramount Skydance’s billionaire owner David Ellison made the stunning announcement yesterday that, if he’s blocked from acquiring legacy studio Warner Bros., he intends to move the entire company out of California. The machinations behind this are complicated, the latest sign that the merger deal is far more difficult and imperiled than many financial analysts expected it to be.

Matt Yglesias, on Abdul El-Sayed’s health care plan: . . . leftists have absolutely savaged non-leftists who put incremental ideas on the table, including even transformative ones like Pete Buttigieg’s Medicare for All Who Want It. . . . if El-Sayed can create a permission structure for characterizing “Medicare for All” as an aspirational statement of values rather than a specific piece of legislation, he will be doing a tremendous favor to all kinds of center-left Democrats. . . .

Generation Z is often described as distracted, cynical, politically inconsistent, or allergic to institutions. But this description misses the deeper rupture. What distinguishes this generation is not a lack of politics but the collapse of faith in the institutions and rules that once gave politics, work, and adulthood a recognizable structure.

Last night was a sobering one for the Left. After months of exhilarating victories, including Abdul El-Sayed’s stunning Michigan Senate primary win just last week, the Left’s hopes for another high-profile Midwest triumph crashed in Wisconsin, where socialist gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong saw her double-digit polling lead evaporate into a 0.5 point defeat to the Democratic establishment’s centrist choice, David Crowley.

In the recent Democratic primary in Missouri’s first congressional district, which includes all of St Louis and much of northern St Louis County, including Ferguson, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)–funded incumbent Wesley Bell bucked national trends. Whereas AIPAC support has become an albatross for many candidates running in Democratic primaries, Bell easily defeated former congresswoman and Israel critic Cori Bush.

For nearly six months, Relli Ramakrishna has not made the daily walk to the small farm where she spent most of her life cultivating cashews, mangoes, and seasonal vegetables. Now her mornings pass in a quiet repetition of boredom. She stays at home, attending to chores that end long before the day does. “There is nothing left for me to do,” she says. “The farm was my work.

Francesca Hong, the democratic socialist running in the Democratic primary for the Wisconsin governor’s race, lost last night in an extremely close election. She came within half a percentage point of beating David Crowley, the executive of Milwaukee County. Preelection polling showed Hong with a commanding lead, and many assumed she would coast to victory. As such, her result is being spun as a hard defeat for the socialist left. The truth is more complicated.