Sarah Jaffe
Sarah Jaffe is a reporting fellow at the Type Media Center, covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. She is the author of the book, Necessary Trouble: America's New Radicals (Nation Books/2016). Follow her on Twitter: @sarahljaffe.
Articles by this author
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Views Friday, August 30, 2019 As the World Burns Photographs of the Amazon rainforest on fire have made it hard to think about anything else. There’s a sense of existential horror in watching the trees burn, knowing that this particular stretch of green keeps us all breathing day in and day out as the world heats, and that the Brazilian president... Read more |
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Views Sunday, August 18, 2019 Bad Boss Trump, the Great Organizer There’s an old saying in the labor movement that “the boss is the best organizer.” That is, nothing will unite a workforce faster than a bad boss; nothing will create class consciousness faster than an abusive manager at the helm. And what is Donald Trump but the worst possible boss? After all, the... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 01, 2019 The Politics of Petulance, From Donald Trump to Boris Johnson onald Trump’s campaign is selling drinking straws. Plastic drinking straws, naturally. The campaign has raised nearly half a million from sales of packs of fifteen red straws with “TRUMP” branded on them, as an alternative to “liberal paper straws.” The premise, of course, is that liberals with... Read more |
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Views Monday, July 22, 2019 The Real Trouble with Ilhan Omar lhan Omar has spent most of her adult life making trouble—good trouble, as her colleague John Lewis, with whom she’s just introduced a resolution supporting Americans’ right to participate in boycott movements, likes to say. So it’s perhaps understandable that she maintains an impressive cool under... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, February 01, 2017 After the Apocalypse: Trying to Describe Reality in Unreal Times Since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, I’ve seen several photos of chalkboards in front of bookstores, reading something along the lines of, “Dystopian Fiction Has Now Been Moved to Current Events.” It’s a good joke, and one that gets a lot of clicks and reposts on Facebook and... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, September 28, 2016 Standing Firm at Standing Rock: Why the Struggle is Bigger Than One Pipeline The first sign that not everything is normal as you drive down Highway 1806 toward the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota is a checkpoint manned by camouflage-clad National Guard troops. The inspection on Sept. 13 was perfunctory; they simply asked if we knew “what was going on down the road... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, August 23, 2016 Trickle Down Election Economics: How Big Money Can Affect Small Races At a press event in Kingston, New York, a Hudson Valley community about 90 miles north of Manhattan, the local Democratic congressional candidate, Zephyr Teachout , earlier this month called for a debate. But not with her Republican opponent, John Faso . Instead she issued the challenge to two high... Read more |
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Views Monday, August 08, 2016 ‘We Triggered Something Epic’: The Fight for $15 and Beyond When Naquasia LeGrand first got involved with the Fight for $15 workers’ movement, it was, she says, “underground.” No one, least of all her, knew how far the movement would spread in the four years since she helped launch the first fast-food workers’ strike, in New York City in November 2012. New... Read more |
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Views Thursday, July 14, 2016 Is What’s Good For Facebook Not So Good For Democracy? Around the country, thousands have returned to the streets again to protest the deaths of black people at the hands of the police. One of those deaths, the shooting of 32-year-old Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, was broadcast on Facebook Live by Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, June 01, 2016 Why the Verizon Worker's Victory is A Big Deal Friday, May 27, the six-and-a-half-week Verizon strike came to an end with a tentative contract agreement. The Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the unions that represent the Verizon workers, hailed the contract as a victory, citing its creation... Read more |