The Progressive

When it comes to vaccines, here’s my advice: Listen to what your doctor tells you, and no one else. Nothing makes me more upset than vaccine deniers and skeptics, especially the ones who believe with all their hearts that vaccines cause autism. Even if that was remotely true (and it isn’t), is having autism worse than having measles? Some people seem to think so.

When his brother was assassinated in the Venezuelan town of Betijoque on March 16, 2012, Arsenio Ortiz Acuña knew it was time to make the perilous crossing back into Colombia. His brother’s killing was a rude awakening, sending him back into the orbit of the violence he had escaped only four years prior. Ortiz had fled his Colombian homeland for Venezuela in February 2008. At that time, Colombia’s northeastern border department of Norte de Santander was besieged by paramilitary and guerrilla war.

When Madeleine Sparrow was in middle school, she spent an afternoon at her best friend’s house in Pittsboro, a small town in central North Carolina. Sparrow walked to the kitchen to fill a glass of water when her young friend interjected. “Don’t drink from the sink,” she told Sparrow. “It has PFAS in it.” Sparrow, who was twelve years old at the time, didn’t yet know what PFAS were. Her friend explained that invisible chemicals were polluting the water, making it unsafe to drink.

What is the history of resistance in the United States? What separates effective resistance from performative noise? Most importantly, why are most resistance efforts doomed to failure? These are the questions that Tad Stoermer addresses in his urgent new book, A Resistance History of the United States.

For fifteen years, I worked in financial regulation and consumer protection, most of that time at the Conference of State Bank Supervisors. My job involved bringing Republican and Democratic state regulators together to go after payday lenders who were writing loans engineered never to be repaid and debt collectors chasing debts that did not exist. It was slow, technical work, and politics rarely mattered.

I met Hala inside a worn-out tent in Al-Mawasi in southern Gaza. The thirty-five-year-old was holding a piece of white fabric, a small needle, and a black thread, embroidering a Palestinian keffiyeh. From time to time, she narrowed her eyes to improve her vision, which had been severely affected by an injury she sustained during the war. In October 2024, an Israeli strike put Hala, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her safety, in a coma for five days.

One very vivid memory that I will never forget took place on September 11, 2001. I was fourteen years old, still in middle school, living in a U.N. refugee camp in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. I was home with my family, watching TV on a warm afternoon. Suddenly, the mosque’s loudspeakers began blaring, filling the whole camp with an announcement: “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.” Members of Hamas were proclaiming victory over the United States; they said the “devil” had been struck in its heart.

Mina sits in a white tarpaulin tent inside a repurposed school hall on the outskirts of Tyre, a city in southern Lebanon. She’s suddenly overwhelmed with grief as she reflects on the home she was forced to leave behind in the quiet hillside town of Beit Lif on the country’s southern border, which is now under Israeli occupation. “It was a big and beautiful house,” says Mina, who asked to withhold her real name due to safety concerns.

As this issue goes to press, with Spain having won, I am surveying the 2026 men’s World Cup soccer tournament and asking, “Is this sport still an effective lens for understanding the present state of human society?” That provocative thesis was levied in 2004 by Franklin Foer in his Pollyannaish bestseller How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. In it, Foer celebrates soccer as a reflection of the greatness of globalization.

The U.S. government is about to spend a historic amount of public money on an unproven and lightly regulated school voucher-like program. The beneficiaries of similar programs at the state level have largely been wealthier families already enrolled in private school. But with upward of 80 percent of U.S. students attending public schools, the fact is that the federal program diverts money from public schools that desperately need funding.