‘Beirut 2020’ Portends What Awaits America
Majdalani’s Beirut 2020 warns that unwillingness to enforce rules and due process lies at the heart of the problems plaguing both Lebanon and America.
Economics
Tribeca 2021: ‘LFG’ Shows the Struggle and Sacrifice in Fight for Equal Pay
Sean Fine and Andrea Nix’s new documentary, LFG, focuses on the women’s national soccer team’s court battle to get paid what they’re worth.
Capitalism Chemistry or ‘Drug Use for Grown-ups’
Our capitalist language of minute gradations and improvised adjustments—of the plasticity of bodies and minds—places drugs in the service of economies of labor, production, and value.
Why Work Doesn’t Work
The idea that we work because we want to, not because we need to, is a pernicious one that labor journalist Sarah Jaffe dissects in Work Won't Love You Back.
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COVID-19 and Our Purgatory of Consumerism
Our pandemic quarantine has become the sublime enactment of Baudrillard's theory of consumption – that modern consumption, with its myth of individual liberty and choice, is in fact 'de-socialising'.
Balanced on the Thin Edge of Democracy, Can We See the Tipping Point?
The Trump-bolstered radical right are akin to fourth-century Christian fanatics who -- in the space of a single generation -- transformed the Roman empire from a state of broadly tolerant religious plurality to one of violence and societal destruction.
Automation and the Future of Work (excerpt)
In Automation and the Future of Work, Aaron Benanav uncovers the structural economic trends that will shape our working lives far into the future. In this excerpt, courtesy of Verso Books, he considers what's on our minds these days, "What if everyone suddenly had access to enough healthcare, education, and welfare to reach their full potential?"
Plattetopia: The Prefabrication of Utopia in East Berlin
With the fall of the Berlin Wall came the licence to take a wrecking ball to its nightmare of repression. But there began the unwritten violence of Die Wende, the peaceful revolution that hides the Oedipal violence of one order killing another.
Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto (excerpt)
Just as big tech leads world in data for profit, the US government can produce data for the public good, sans the bureaucracy. This excerpt of Julia Lane's Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto will whet your appetite for disruptive change in data management, which is critical for democracy's survival.
Breaching Closure in Pasolini’s ‘Teorema’
Pier Paolo Pasolini's classic drama, Teorema, grapples with the parable -- the manner of knowing that which always remains just beyond our grasp.