Essays Archive - Page 39 of 131

Branding Myself

How a freelance writer’s summer internship made her reconsider how to market herself

September 1, 2021 • by Hannah Hightman

_____ This past summer, I was an intern at Sarankco, a creative studio and consultancy located in Manhattan. According to the firm’s website, Sarankco specializes in “developing brands that create awareness; designing experiences that influence behavior; and creating communications that drive engagement.” As a freelance writer who had previously written for The ...

Economy

The Big Tax Breaks Behind Big Chicken

All subsidizing these giants does is reinforce the status quo

September 1, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

_____ The Guardian published a good piece recently by Nina Lakhani, who looked at the power Tyson — which is one of the largest meat processors in the world and the largest chicken processor in the U.S. — has over local communities, businesses, and workers. “When a company like Tyson can get ...

Past Present

The U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Past Present Podcast, Episode 291

August 31, 2021 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: After nearly two decades, President Biden announced that all American troops were leaving Afghanistan, which quickly fell to the Taliban. Natalia referred to Jeremy Varon’s Washington Post piece about the antiwar movement, and to this conversation at Public Seminarbetween historians ...

Capitalism

The Commons versus Capitalism

Can commonality dodge the threat of capitalist exploitation and develop into an organizational principle for complex societies?

August 31, 2021 • by Thijs Lijster

_____ Although every proprietor knows his own, … all things, so long as they will last, are used in common amongst them. Thomas Morton regarding the Five Nations in North America Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of the ‘commons’ has steadily ascended in significance in activist circles, scientific literature ...

Politics

Will GOP Voters Go to War with Corporations Over New Vaccine Mandates?

And what are Republican leaders going to do when the civil society moves in the direction of good public health?

August 30, 2021 • by John Stoehr

_____ Now that the Food and Drug Administration has finally given its full blessing to the Pfizer BioNTech shot, the president is jawboning corporate leaders into establishing mandates requiring employees to be vaccinated. This is not a reversal, as some reporters have said. Joe Biden is not ordering firms to do ...

Will GOP Voters Go to War with Corporations Over New Vaccine Mandates?

Politics

Individualism Vs. the Common Good in America

For all that Republicans insist that individualism is the heart of Americanism, in fact the history of federal protection of the common good began in the 1860s

August 30, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

_____ America is in a watershed moment. Since the 1980s, the country has focused on individualism: the idea that the expansion of the federal government after the Depression in the 1930s created a form of collectivism that we must destroy by cutting taxes and slashing regulation to leave individuals free to ...

Individualism Vs. the Common Good in America

Interviews

In the Aftermath of War

What the post-1975 history of the Vietnam War should teach us about the days, months, and years after the United States leaves Afghanistan

August 27, 2021 • by Claire Potter and Amanda Demmer

_____ As the military situation in Afghanistan began to unspool at the end of July, and comparisons to the United States 1975 evacuation of Saigon proliferated, I wanted to know more. So I reached for Amanda Demmer’s After Saigon's Fall: Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2021) to think ...

History

How the War on Global Poverty Failed

As economic programs and policies shifted from the nation to the individual, United States development experts made political allies at home but failed the world

August 25, 2021 • by Joanne Meyerowitz

_____ In 1976, Michael Harrington traveled to India, Kenya, and Tanzania to bear witness to global poverty. A prolific author with a prophetic bent, Harrington had risen to fame in 1962 with The Other America, a book that stunned readers with its searing exposé of poverty in the United States, caught ...

Columnists

The Un-Canceling of Biographer Blake Bailey

W.W. Norton took a financial bath on Philip Roth: A Biography, and Skyhorse Press will make all the profits. Is this the end of cancel culture?

August 25, 2021 • by Claire Potter

_____ A little less than three months ago, charges emerged that Blake Bailey had groomed female middle school students for sex and that he had pestered and sexually assaulted adult women. After what were undoubtedly agonizing internal debates, W.W. Norton exercised the morals clause in Bailey’s contract, putting his 2014 memoir ...

The Un-Canceling of Biographer Blake Bailey

Climate & Ecology

A Patch of Moonlight

Darwin’s warning

August 25, 2021 • by Ruth Padel

_____ Rustles of the night in the Nilgiri Hills. I sit behind the low wall of a veranda beside Priya who invited me here, her husband Jean Philippe, and her brother Peter. They are scientists and naturalists. This is what they do every night. I am very lucky to be their ...

History

Serendipity in the Archives

Or, a lost freedom story I found while looking for something else

August 25, 2021 • by Marcus Rediker

_____ During the early 1980s historian Peter Linebaugh and I decided to write a book about transatlantic currents of radicalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was a project that eventually became The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press and Verso ...

Columnists

Is Bad Faith Sabotaging the Fight Against Covid?

To our country’s elites, it makes perfect sense that if the CDC wants the public’s trust, it has to do better

August 25, 2021 • by John Stoehr

_____ Nicole Carroll is the editor-in-chief of USA Today. Earlier this month, her newspaper ran an interview between her and her brother. Chris Carroll refuses to get vaccinated. He’s educated, conservative, religious, and Texas-proud. He’s a Trump supporter, too. Nicole ran the piece to explain why some Americans refuse to do ...

Essays

Branding Myself

How a freelance writer’s summer internship made her reconsider how to market herself

The Big Tax Breaks Behind Big Chicken

All subsidizing these giants does is reinforce the status quo

The U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Past Present Podcast, Episode 291

The Commons versus Capitalism

Can commonality dodge the threat of capitalist exploitation and develop into an organizational principle for complex societies?

Will GOP Voters Go to War with Corporations Over New Vaccine Mandates?

And what are Republican leaders going to do when the civil society moves in the direction of good public health?

Individualism Vs. the Common Good in America

For all that Republicans insist that individualism is the heart of Americanism, in fact the history of federal protection of the common good began in the 1860s

In the Aftermath of War

What the post-1975 history of the Vietnam War should teach us about the days, months, and years after the United States leaves Afghanistan

How the War on Global Poverty Failed

As economic programs and policies shifted from the nation to the individual, United States development experts made political allies at home but failed the world

The Un-Canceling of Biographer Blake Bailey

W.W. Norton took a financial bath on Philip Roth: A Biography, and Skyhorse Press will make all the profits. Is this the end of cancel culture?

A Patch of Moonlight

Darwin’s warning

Serendipity in the Archives

Or, a lost freedom story I found while looking for something else

Is Bad Faith Sabotaging the Fight Against Covid?

To our country’s elites, it makes perfect sense that if the CDC wants the public’s trust, it has to do better

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