Like many things in the world, this blog has been lost in the vortex of the coronavirus. I just logged back into my account to see that my last post was from the uncertain days at the start of the lockdown, before we really had a sense of how long this would last.

Although I have been incredibly fortunate compared to many, the current crisis has been challenging as my wife and I have struggled to keep up with work responsibilities while parenting two babies. As many have observed, the crisis has exposed persistent and huge inequalities in the distribution of reproductive labor, raising fundamental questions about how we care for each other and who gets to continue their lives in safety and relative comfort. Again, we have been fortunate, but the problems of trying to continue some semblance of professional work life while also caring for small children has been tough to say the least.

Still, I have managed to squeeze in a few work- and research-related things amidst the chaos, so I thought I would share one here. I recently had the opportunity to go on The Vast Majority, the podcast hosted by Jacobin Deputy Editor Micah Uetricht. He was joined by his guest co-host and co-author Meagan Day, as well as frequent Jacobin contributor Chris Maisano. The pretext for the conversation was Chris’ recent review of my book, which framed the discussion.

We focused primarily on the question of why there is no labor party in the United States and why this matters, which is what I address in Chapter 4 of the book, but we ventured well beyond that to talk about unions and working-class power more generally. You can find it here.