The Progressive

Twenty-four-year-old Kareem Hassan Awad Al-Tanah woke up one morning in July 2024 feeling too weak to work. He had been spending his days selling children’s toys out of a stall on Gaza’s coast in Az-Zawayda, where he had arrived two months earlier after fleeing the Israeli military’s invasion of Rafah. When he tried to open his stand that day, every movement hurt, so he went back to his family’s tent and tried to sleep. The temperature hovered just under 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of the Odyssey, which opened in theaters worldwide on July 17, sparked controversy during its production for filming in Western Sahara, an independent territory that has been under occupation by Morocco for more than fifty years. As critics like Eoghan Gilmartin have rightly noted, Hollywood’s presence in Western Sahara would have been unthinkable before 2020, when Donald Trump forced U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the territory.

If you believe, as Ben Wikler does, that democracy in this country is in a death spiral, you should read his newly released book, This Is the Plan. And the sooner the better, because a lot needs to happen by the midterm elections in November.

Michigan Democrats face a critical choice next Tuesday in what polls show is a tight primary race for the U.S. Senate. It pits Representative Haley Stevens, one of the more hawkish and pro-corporate Democratic members in the U.S. House of Representatives, against public health official Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a prominent progressive advocating Medicare for all, progressive taxation, and getting corporate money out of politics.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in February 2025, I knew my life would become more complicated. I am among the estimated fourteen million Americans under age sixty-five who are considered immunocompromised; an additional fifty-eight million over age sixty-five have immune systems that are naturally slower to respond, making them less effective than they once were.

Has the term “democracy” lost all meaning? I can’t be the only leftist who is skeptical of its political usage, given that it has been instrumentalized to justify genocides, wars, colonialism, and imperialism the world over. Danielle Chynoweth and Elizabeth Adams’ new book, Remaking Democracy: How We Make the World We Want, made me rethink my skepticism entirely.

In many ways, the race to be Wisconsin’s next governor is a microcosm of developments happening around the country. The race features politicians from both parties pandering to rural voters. In one campaign ad, U.S. Representative Tom Tiffany, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in the state’s August 11 primary, walks a cow with a halter to display some kind of rural authenticity.

Dr. Amer Nael, who works in Gaza City at the American Hospital and the Al-Ahli Arab National Hospital, has seen firsthand the devastating impact of the health care system’s near-total decimation on his patients in Gaza. Hospitals have been damaged or otherwise reduced to rubble and many medications are blocked from entering the enclave.

When the Mongols invaded Baghdad in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they are believed to have done two things that have since been etched in cultural memory. In 1258, they gathered all the books in the storied House of Wisdom and set them ablaze during the Siege of Baghdad. Then, more than a century later, they built towers from the skulls of those they’d killed.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) officially became federal law on July 26, 1990. So every year at about this time, I write something about how the law passed and if it has improved the lives of people with disabilities in the years since. I always end up saying that disabled folks have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. Nowadays, every public transit bus that passes by my home in Chicago is wheelchair accessible. Before the ADA became law, none of them were.