Section
Capitalism
-
Kafala in the Time of the Flood
The opposite of Kafala is being alive.
-
Hope and Capital: Talking India with Ravinder Kaur
“Anyone who comes in the way of the ‘good times’ becomes a threat to capital, and to the nation-state itself.”
-
Philanthropy and the “Jewish Continuity Crisis”
Today, Jewish philanthropy—like all philanthropy—is big business, thanks to US philanthropy’s torturous entanglement with US capitalism.[none-for-homepage]
-
Worker Worries Are the Seeds of Worker Action
Apps like Uber benefit from making their workers strangers to one another. So what happens when workers start caring for one another?
-
Global Inequality and the Corona Shock
COVID-19 is the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era, affecting virtually everyone on the planet.
-
The World Is a Factory Farm
If factory farming is the source of pathogens like SARS-CoV-2, could smaller-scale farms and communities—even in China—be the safest alternative?
-
The Violence of Urban Vacancy
Houses without people, people without homes: New York has invested in empty storefronts and empty districts, even as most New Yorkers suffer.
-
Fast Food, Precarious Workers
Today—as in 1968—it remains to be seen if McDonald’s pivot toward racial justice will mean anything for how it treats its scores of Black workers.
-
Can the Crowd Speak?
Occupy Wall Street’s great achievement was to briefly create a community that prefigured a robust democratic culture.
-
The Enduring Disposability of Latinx Workers
When employers fail to provide PPE, testing, sick pay, or job protection, the message is clear: Latinx laborers are “not us.”
-
How to Defund the Police
The inconvenient truth of police history in the United States is that police departments were not designed to keep a generic public safe.
-
Pandemic Déjà Vu
The COVID-19 global pandemic has been described as an unprecedented global event. Yet for some, the virus arrives with uncanny familiarity.
-
The Police: Gentrification’s Shock Troops
In Detroit today, politicians promise that real estate development—coupled with police violence—will guarantee the city’s spiritual redemption.[none-for-homepage]
-
Money Is the Gatekeeper of Politics
Rather than taking money out of politics, we should inject more money into politics: but money in the service of the public good.
-
The Oligarchs’ Charter
Today we know that, just as Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson predicted, economic elites will never relinquish supreme power easily.
-
A Communism of Feelings
What role should emotions play in leftist political movements?
-
Political Life in the Age of Catastrophe
Thanks to surveillance, political violence, and AI, we no longer have the luxury of humanist utopias to plan for the future.
-
Can Smart Cities Be Equitable Cities?
Tech does not arrive in a city to save it. Instead, tech’s financial success depends on dismissing and exploiting existing disparities.
-
Public Thinker: B. R. Cohen on How Food Became “Pure”
“There were so many new laws, I had to make a map showing the spread and intensity of antimargarine laws in states over a quarter century.”[none-for-homepage]
-
The Realism of Our Times: Kim Stanley Robinson on How Science Fiction Works
“We’re in a science fiction novel now that we are all co-writing together.”[none-for-homepage]
-
How the Welfare State Became the Neoliberal Order
Today’s neoliberalism emerged when US policymakers built New Deal–style projects abroad—for private gain rather than the public good.[none-for-homepage]
