Damage Magazine

26/06/2024

The rise of the serial killer was the dark side of the American twentieth century. Portrayals of serial killers today paradoxically evince a nostalgia for an age that was not as destructively nihilistic as our own.

24/06/2024

“Institutional racism” was a flawed framework for understanding inequality when it was first introduced by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in 1967. Today, as a synonym for “racial disparities,” it is even more obfuscating.

20/06/2024

The infamous massacre has been wrongly psychologized, when it was in fact a direct result of Washington’s resolve to force the Vietcong into submission through excessive force.

17/06/2024

The Odd Fellows were once the largest fraternal organization in the United States. Much like other such associations, their decline has been rapid and devastating, but remarkably, some still bear great faith in the future of Odd Fellowship.

15/06/2024

The complicated relationship between Medicare and AARP unveils the mixed incentives of consumer advocacy groups and the contradictory nature of nonprofit organizations.

13/06/2024

Amber A'Lee Frost: No matter what you're at the Apple Genius Bar for, it is a bewildering, sci-fi-sleek, calamity where you know nothing of your fate, and your torturers are tortured themselves.

No matter what you're at the Apple Genius Bar for, it is a bewildering, sci-fi-sleek, calamity where you know nothing of your fate, and your torturers are tortured themselves.

15/04/2024

Kensington, Philadelphia has a social problem. Harm reduction policies won’t fix it.

12/04/2024

Christopher Caldwell’s origin story in The Age of Entitlement is frustrating and unconvincing, and nowhere more so than in its lack of attentiveness to the dramatic shifts in black politics in the mid-60s.

02/04/2024

Climate activists are no fans of electric utilities. But the market-based alternatives that they often prefer—for rolling out renewable technologies faster than utilities—will not deliver infrastructural change at the scale we need.

20/03/2024

What does it mean to live in a deinstitutionalized society today, and why do contemporary institutions so often fail to make up for what has been lost? Our second print issue, “Deinstitutionalized,” seeks to find out.

05/03/2024

The realities of the conflict between Israel and Hamas are discomfiting and do not fit into a neat whole, nor do they fit easily into inherited slogans or moral formulas.

07/12/2023

The Democratic Party is having trouble winning working-class voters. But that does not imply, as Sohrab Ahmari argues, that a reformed Republican Party presents a real alternative for advancing working-class interests.

A Reply to Sohrab Ahmari.

29/11/2023

Democratic politics vs. blowing up pipelines is not a great debate. Militant disruption shouldn’t be written out of the tactical repertoire, but it matters who causes it, and to what end.

21/11/2023

Arthur Boriello and Anton Jäger’s "The Populist Moment" helps us understand how political realignment is challenging European populism’s dominance.

Arthur Boriello and Anton Jäger’s The Populist Moment helps us understand how political realignment is challenging European populism’s dominance.

16/11/2023

The Biden-Xi summit did not do much to repair the spiraling US-China relationship. What are the experts saying about how we got here?

08/11/2023

Letting people struggling with drug abuse run themselves into a decrepit state with no social provisions or adequate forms of drug treatment is a tragic mistake. So too is trying to revive a drug prohibitionism that only ever works at the cost of extending the rot of contemporary society.

07/11/2023

Before Kendi’s brand of anti-racism fades into the history books, we should remember why it became popular in the first place. Kendi gave us the professional-class solution to inequality: acknowledge its existence, renounce it rhetorically, then continue on in much the same way as you did before.

03/11/2023

From the print issue: Big public power in the last century applied the elemental potential of water toward social ends. The big public power of tomorrow should revolve around the elemental potential of the atom.

Big public power in the last century applied the elemental potential of water toward social ends. The big public power of tomorrow should revolve around the elemental potential of the atom.

03/11/2023

From the print issue: The Tennessee Valley Authority was about more than electrification. It was a complex project of building state and public planning capacity geared toward rapid ecological restoration of the entire region. For impoverished farmers, it was nothing short of life changing.

The Tennessee Valley Authority was about more than electrification. It was a complex project of building state and public planning capacity geared toward rapid ecological restoration of the entire region. For impoverished farmers, it was nothing short of life changing.

02/11/2023

Contemporary film criticism increasingly takes the form of a ceaseless hunt for hidden messages in movies. In addition to producing outlandish interpretations, it is also confusing the role of art in society.

25/10/2023

To fix what deindustrialization broke, manufacturing still matters—don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Subscribe to get our first print issue.

To fix what deindustrialization broke, manufacturing still matters—don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

25/10/2023

John Gray believes the modern state is a new totalitarian entity promising not freedom but the much lesser good of “meaning” through security and a progressive identity. But the “new Leviathans” are much weaker than he lets on.

11/10/2023

The death of the subject was about the loss of human agency. Today we are witnessing the undermining of something recognizably human as such.

04/10/2023

Debates about global economic stagnation are unlikely to resolve the pressing political questions they raise. Better to tackle the politics directly than fall back into theory battles.

03/10/2023

The Civilian Conservation Corps did more than prime the economy from the bottom up and restore the land. It also gave many young men meaningful work for the first time in their lives.

16/08/2023

Recent service industry hero tales like The Menu, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Bear are not crafted for the people whose work they romanticize, but for their bosses, managers and customers. What message are these stories meant to deliver?

29/07/2023

Welfare for Markets examines the various political, economic, social, and ideological transformations that allowed basic income to be dressed up as a smart idea. Today, rather than succumb to the dominance of money, we should resume an older conversation about the collective determination of needs.

05/07/2023

The opening editorial of our first print issue, “Building Big Things," is up on our site now. Read and subscribe to get the first issue.

The opening editorial of our first print issue, “Building Big Things.”

01/07/2023

A new crop of academic critics treat working-class differentiation as a theoretical conclusion rather than as a point of departure. This is a profoundly cynical position that obscures the true sources of defeat: working-class atomization and resignation.

30/06/2023

Fritz Bartel’s The Triumph of Broken Promises enhances our empirical understanding of why the Cold War ended when and how it did. But his book contains an ambivalent account of the importance of ideology in East and West that raises questions about its causal story.