Jacobin

When one thinks of the rich in the United States, the first people who come to mind are the megabillionaires whose extravagant consumption, eye-popping wealth, and notorious political interventions have transformed them into household names. Perched atop the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest individuals are Silicon Valley moguls and Wall Street executives who command some of the most prominent corporations in America.

More than the “revolutionary historian” promised by the subtitle, the Eric Hobsbawm chronicled in Emile Chabal’s biography is above all a canny academic entrepreneur. Early in his career, Hobsbawm found a literary agent and converted his lectures for undergraduates into a series of best-selling books. He made valuable contacts with rising-star scholars and publishing houses in continental Europe.

The English inventor Charles Babbage is best remembered for his work designing the foundations for all digital computers with Ada Lovelace in the nineteenth century. What’s lesser known is why he wanted to build them. In the decades leading up to the British Empire’s abolition of slavery in the West Indies in 1833 (which Babbage supported), there was a serious question of how to get free and rebellious industrial workers to produce enough to sustain the empire.

“When I first saw it, I was like, ‘It’s a block.’” Woodlawn resident Linda Spears had been watching the construction of the Obama Foundation’s sprawling campus from her condo overlooking Jackson Park in Chicago, but it wasn’t until opening weekend, when the barriers came down, that she finally went inside.

Over the past decade since his first presidential run, no one has done more to reshape the American left than Bernie Sanders. He is the most influential left-wing leader this country has seen since the 1960s, if not longer. While Sanders’s political career began decades earlier, his influence took on national dimensions ten years ago, when Sanders first campaigned for president against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

On Sunday night, the Irish soccer team bowed their heads in silence as the Israeli anthem echoed through the all but empty Nagyerdei Stadium in Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city. The Irish players, who wore black armbands, skipped the traditional pregame rituals. There were no handshakes, no pennants, and (for the most part) no fans. After months of deliberations and growing demands for a boycott, these trite gestures of dissent were all the Irish team could muster.

Is the US Constitution for or against slavery? Questions concerning the legacy of America’s founding and how to interpret the Constitution have long gripped public discourse; in recent years they have become inseparable. From the 1980s came the originalists, a group of legal theorists who sought to recover the Constitution’s original meaning through textual analysis buttressed by historical investigation.

“The number one rule of political fundraising,” Evan Barker writes in the first line of Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, “is to never, ever, under any circumstances, speak about it publicly.” Then she spends 288 pages talking about it, and it’s a wonderful thing that she does.

In the late 1870s, a visitor to Karl Marx’s North London house might have found the author of Capital on his hands and knees in the garden, with his grandson Johnny on his back shouting, “Go on! Plus vite! Hurrah!” Marx was past sixty, and he would keep at it until he was covered in sweat. This is not the Marx most people picture. He is commonly known as a curmudgeon — a “salty” fellow with harsh words, not exactly the warm and fuzzy type.

Interview by John-Baptiste Oduor In 2011, Owen Jones solidified his reputation as one of Britain’s sharpest political commentators when he published Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. In the aftermath of the longest-serving Labour government in history, Jones asked how working-class people came to be vilified not just by elites but by representatives of the parties that supposedly existed to serve their interests.