COVID-19 has been not just a crisis of public health but also a crisis of public reason. What do we know, and how should we act? From masks to models and from data to drugs, the novel coronavirus has prompted a high-stakes dispute about ideas: which evidence counts, which arguments succeed, and which interventions matter. The essays in this volume—from leading physicians and epidemiologists, historians and social scientists, anthropologists and philosophers—explore this meeting place of science and society head on.

From the COVID-19 pandemic to uprisings over police brutality, we are living in the greatest social crisis of a generation. But the roots of these latest emergencies stretch back decades. At their core is a brutal neoliberal ideology that combines deep structural racism with a relentless assault on social welfare. Contributors to this volume not only protest these neoliberal roots of our present catastrophe, but they insist there is another way forward: a new kind of politics—a politics of care—that centers people’s basic needs and connections to fellow citizens, the global community, and the natural world.

What might happen if a woman's right to vote is seen as coequal with her right to be elected? And why are other countries so much better than the United States at electing women to office?

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 both an essential and troubling part of being a moral agent in an imperfect 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?

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.

Our most ambitious issue to date. Bringing together thirty-two world-class economists, political scientists, and philosophers, 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.

Lead essayist Donna Murch writes that, “historically, the division between ‘dope’ and medicine was the race and class of users.” By using the concept of “racial capitalism” to examine the opioid crisis alongside the War on Drugs, Murch brings an otherwise familiar story into new territory. To understand the twisted logic that created the divergent responses to drug use—succor and sympathy for white users, prison and expulsion for people of color—Murch shows how a racialized regime of drug prohibitions led Purdue Pharma to market OxyContin specifically to whites.

“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.