New Future

Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, has been cast as everything from guru to sellout. But behind the fanfare lies something more familiar: a health-tech entrepreneur selling wearables and wellness with antiestablishment rhetoric.

In the eighth but likely not final entry in the Mission: Impossible series, The Final Reckoning finds Tom Cruise squaring off against an AI “Entity. ” As always, the stunts are impressive. But no force on Earth can make Ethan Hunt a compelling character.

Benjamin Netanyahu is running out of road for his genocidal assault on Gaza.

Germany’s socialist party Die Linke has been revitalized by its recent election breakthrough. With the Social Democrats cravenly backing Friedrich Merz’s conservative and militarist agenda, Die Linke has to offer a bold oppositional message.

The al-Hawl refugee camp in northeastern Syria is effectively an open-air prison for 50,000 people suspected of ties to ISIS. The Syrian Democratic Forces are struggling to deal with them — and now the Trump administration is cutting US funding.

In the Balkan state of Montenegro, public land is being turned over to luxury hotels and megaports for yachts. In a new agreement, investors from the United Arab Emirates will be able to bypass legislation and carve up the country as they please.

Today marks the 500th anniversary of Thomas Müntzer’s execution after he led a mass revolt that was both religious and social in its content. Müntzer’s complex, contradictory career has long been a source of fascination for historians of class conflict.

To the dismay of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the law currently prevents Big Tech companies from opening banks. But if Congress passes the GENIUS Act, tech firms may start issuing private currencies and forcing us to use them.

During the Cold War, the CIA and State Department understood that there is power in a union. After the successful purges of leftists from unions, US labor leaders were enlisted by government officials to join in their imperialist operations across the world.

The Trump administration isn’t supporting new clean energy projects, but green union jobs are still growing — for now. It’ll take state and local organizing to keep the momentum going.

The new pope’s homage to Leo XIII invokes Rerum novarum, the Catholic Church’s 1891 encyclical engaging with the social upheavals of industrial capitalism. His warnings about today’s economy suggest a renewed focus on justice, labor, and the common good.

The absurd titles of Erik Satie’s compositions would provoke howls of laughter at concerts in early 20th-century Paris. Some critics condemned Satie’s eccentricities — but a new book argues that his wit is what makes his experimental work so important.

A new Criterion series of McCarthy-era noir films is a timely collection for an era of rising government repression — though you wouldn’t know it from Criterion’s oddly subdued promotion.

The Democrats neglected their voter base in 2024 and failed to respond to Trump’s campaign with anything beyond the maintenance of a bankrupt neoliberalism.