Scott W. Stern

The Women She Left Behind

Eleanor Roosevelt’s tacit support for a program that jailed sex workers suggests the limits of the elite-led reform efforts she championed.

A Toxic Bottom Line

“Solidarity between the environmental and labor movements would be powerful because it could provide a vision of a future that isn’t based on extraction.”

The Lost Promise of Environmental Rights

Fifty years ago, working-class activists tried to make courts and legislatures affirm rights to clean air and water. Today that strategy is on the verge of a comeback.

Dire Straits

Toxic Debt, Josiah Rector’s history of Detroit’s struggles for clean air and water, argues that municipal debt and austerity have furthered an ongoing environmental catastrophe.

An AIDS Activist’s Archive

The obituaries saved by one social worker are, essentially, a list of names and the barest outlines of biography. But in their silences, they contain multitudes.