Essays Archive - Page 37 of 131

How Corporate Subsidies Sink Small Businesses

The Alabama insurance market shows how tax breaks benefit dominant corporations

September 20, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

One of the more pernicious effects of states chucking huge sums of money at dominant corporations is that the lawmakers doing so are harming their own local businesses. Smaller outlets that already face an array of challenges when it comes to competing with the big guys have to just sit ...

How Corporate Subsidies Sink Small Businesses

Colonization

A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

September 20, 2021 • by Casper Andersen

_____ Oppressed people who retaliate are up against the privileged and powerful. Fighting back often places them outside the system. But what happens when the suppressors’ tools are turned on themselves? Can a colonial education—the underhand offer of ‘a pencil for land’—be turned into an emancipatory counter movement? ‘Colonial mimicry’ describes a ...

Feminism

Kathy Acker’s Astrologer Told Her She Would Meet Somebody—and That Was Me

A conversation with McKenzie Wark, one of our most dazzling contemporary theorists, about what we can learn from one of America’s most dazzling postmodern writers

September 17, 2021 • by Claire Potter and McKenzie Wark

Claire Potter: Let’s begin where the book begins—your relationship with Kathy Acker. McKenzie Wark: I should start by saying that the relationship was incredibly brief. She had a lot of them. It is the kind of thing she did—fall massively in love with somebody. It would last a few weeks, as it did ...

Kathy Acker’s Astrologer Told Her She Would Meet Somebody—and That Was Me

Activism

Ten Years After Occupy Wall Street

A moment of madness that began on September 17, 2011, illuminated the world where the “99 percent” lived

September 17, 2021 • by Nara Roberta Silva

Ten years ago, on September 17, 2011, a few hundred people spent the night at Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and formally initiated the movement known as Occupy Wall Street. Occupiers had no immediate goals and the occupation lasted two months. But it wasn’t insignificant, and its importance as an inflection ...

Capitalism

Welcome to the Chip Wars

Intel wants another HQ2 contest, this time for chip manufacturers.

September 15, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

_____ The Amazon “HQ2” contest—in which hundreds of cities threw everything including the kitchen sink at Amazon in the hopes of landing a new facility—was a national embarrassment showing just how tight corporate America’s grip on economic development policy is (at least until New York said no way). In a recent interview with ...

Columnists

For the Freedom to Vote

The protection of voting rights seems more vital than ever

September 15, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

_____ This week, the team of Democratic senators working on a voting rights measure that could meet the demands of conservative Democratic West Virginia senator Joe Manchin released their bill. The 592-page document is described as a bill “to expand Americans’ access to the ballot box and reduce the influence of ...

Politics

We Do Not Have a Public Health Crisis. We Have a Crisis of Law and Order

Let’s not mince words about “freedoms”

September 15, 2021 • by John Stoehr

_____ So, again, with feeling: Anti-vaccine GOP leaders are lawless. Their followers are often criminal. (I mean this literally.) I’m going to keep repeating myself no matter how many times they claim to be “fighting for their freedom.” I’m going to keep calling on the government to put an end to ...

We Do Not Have a Public Health Crisis. We Have a Crisis of Law and Order

Media

Are White People Really in Decline?

No, but when the mainstream media reports changing racial demographics as a contest for social domination, they validate white supremacists’ worst fears

September 15, 2021 • by Karen Gaffney

_____ When the United States Census Bureau released its 2020 census on August 12, 2021, the news media highlighted two important trends in race and ethnicity: a drop in the number of white people and a rise in the number of people who identify with more than one racial group. Both facts represent ...

Activism

Cut the Pentagon!

Says Code Pink

September 14, 2021 • by Jo Freeman

_____ CopePink brought roughly one hundred people to the White House to demand that the Pentagon’s budget be cut. Joined by other sponsors of the action in Lafayette Park, they cut up a large cake shaped like the Pentagon. Pieces of cake were passed to the crowd while speakers talked about the next ...

Philosophy

A New Perspective on Richard Rorty’s Philosophy

A series of lectures belatedly published in English sheds new light on the mind of a moralist

September 14, 2021 • by Laura Nelson

1 Richard Rorty, the American philosopher and public intellectual who died in 2007, is perhaps best known as “the philosopher who predicted Donald Trump.” In Achieving Our Country, a book articulating his reflections on the possibilities and prospects for democracy in the United States, Rorty worried that economic inequality, coupled with ...

A New Perspective on Richard Rorty’s Philosophy

Democracy

“You Cannot Force Me to Look and Not to See”

Large-scale repression against students and the academic community in Belarus continues

September 13, 2021 • by Alaiza Pashkevich

A liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not,not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of Nature.—John Locke, Second Treatise of Government Kids in ...

“You Cannot Force Me to Look and Not to See”

The Arts

The Radicalism of the Frick Madison

The inequities of America in 2021 play out on the museum’s walls

September 13, 2021 • by Altair Brandon-Salmon

_____ Ingres’s portrait of the Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845) has always surveyed her audience coolly. A hand tucked under her chin, head crooked at an angle, she looks at us with a mixture of curiosity and disdain, as though we were underwhelming members of her Parisian salon. Securely encased in an elaborate gilded ...

Essays

How Corporate Subsidies Sink Small Businesses

The Alabama insurance market shows how tax breaks benefit dominant corporations

A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

Kathy Acker’s Astrologer Told Her She Would Meet Somebody—and That Was Me

A conversation with McKenzie Wark, one of our most dazzling contemporary theorists, about what we can learn from one of America’s most dazzling postmodern writers

Ten Years After Occupy Wall Street

A moment of madness that began on September 17, 2011, illuminated the world where the “99 percent” lived

Welcome to the Chip Wars

Intel wants another HQ2 contest, this time for chip manufacturers.

For the Freedom to Vote

The protection of voting rights seems more vital than ever

We Do Not Have a Public Health Crisis. We Have a Crisis of Law and Order

Let’s not mince words about “freedoms”

Are White People Really in Decline?

No, but when the mainstream media reports changing racial demographics as a contest for social domination, they validate white supremacists’ worst fears

Cut the Pentagon!

Says Code Pink

A New Perspective on Richard Rorty’s Philosophy

A series of lectures belatedly published in English sheds new light on the mind of a moralist

“You Cannot Force Me to Look and Not to See”

Large-scale repression against students and the academic community in Belarus continues

The Radicalism of the Frick Madison

The inequities of America in 2021 play out on the museum’s walls

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