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Too hot to handle: Facebook mistakes Willendorf Virgin for porn
“An archaeological object, especially iconic, should not be banned from Facebook,” the Museum of Natural History in Vienna said.
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Bubbles, stocks and crashes
WHAT is happening in the U.S. economy provides an object lesson on the functioning of neo-liberal capitalism. Pre-first world war capitalism which had witnessed the long Victorian and Edwardian boom had relied on the colonial arrangement for the system’s dynamics.
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The robot, unemployment, and immigrants
For every industrial robot introduced into the workforce, six jobs are eliminated. – Since a few days, Amazon has started Amazon Go. The idea is simple: a shop where you go in, take whatever you want from the shelves, and the cost goes automatically to a magnetic card that you carry.
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A plea for Ahed Tamimi’s protection
The Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick of Che Guevara black and red portrait fame has done it again: He has painted a minimalist poster of another iconic leader of her people and of a worldwide liberation movement, this time of an oppressed child who had slapped power with her bare truth. When I read his rationale for painting the new portrait I cried. The man’s pacifism, sincerity, and especially his concern for Ahed Tamimi’s life touched me.
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The fight over free speech on campus
On university campuses around the world, “free speech” is becoming the favourite slogan of the right, sure to be raised during campus political controversies.
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The political economy of space and time in Eduardo Galeano
Uruguyan novelist and historian Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) wrote more than 40 books. Monthly Review lauded his creative non-fiction Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1973[1971]) as ‘outstanding political economy … and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx’.
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Movements of millions say no to gene drives as Brazil attempts to legalize genetic extinction technology
The largest rural movements in Brazil, representing well over a million farmers, are protesting a new Brazilian regulation that would allow release of gene drives, the controversial genetic extinction technology, into Brazil’s ecosystems and farms.
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Google’s stranglehold on information
Last September, Verge writer Cat Ferguson uncovered that Google had unwittingly allowed shady generators to manipulate its AdWords system.
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How the anti-democracy movement use media to command the narrative
As far back as 1835, perhaps our nation’s earliest and most astute observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, understood the power of the media. He described the press as “the chief democratic instrument of freedom.” But today our “instrument of freedom” seems to mean the freedom to enrich oneself privately, whatever it takes. How did we get to this sad state?
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There is no such thing as a natural disaster
“Policies aimed at aid and reconstruction became their own forms of punishment, leaving the island more indebted, unequal, dependent and polluted than it was before the hurricane hit.”
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The origin of the millennial label (and how mainstream media fails to point it out)
Here’s an experiment for you-ask five people if they know where the “millennial” label came from. Chances are that none of them will know. In fact, not much is known about the meaning of the label, other than it being a synonym for “young people” or a catch-all term for those who are “x-to-x” years old.
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Is equality enough?
Race/isms Book Forum is a new series aimed at bringing established and emerging voices together in conversation around recent work that critically engages our world’s racial scripts, past and present. The structure of the forum is straightforward. We invite three to four thinkers to grapple with a book, highlighting a section of it, and then provide the author(s) an opportunity to respond however they see fit.
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‘Black Panther’ is not the movie we deserve
Even in a comic-book movie, black American men are relegated to the lowest rung of political regard. So low that the sole white leading character in the movie, the CIA operative Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), gets to be a hero who helps save Wakanda.
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Globalization and U.S. labor’s falling share of national output
The decline in the payroll share of output is class power at work: unfortunately theirs, not ours.
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Finding ways to be one: The making of Cedric J. Robinson’s radical Black politics.
Historian Robin D.G. Kelley explores the radical Black politics of scholar Cedric J. Robinson—from his historical understanding of race and capitalism as inherently inseparable systems, to his vision of the possibilities of politics, rooted deep in struggles past and present.
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The gong of history; or, what is a human?
Every great historical epoch in the freedom struggle raises the question: what is a human? The answer changes, to quote Askia Muhammad Toure of the Revolutionary Action Movement, with “the Gong of History.” Amid all the confusing din of history, a note may sound that makes it audible and intelligible.
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Raoul Peck speaks on ‘The Young Karl Marx’
Written and directed by Raoul Peck, “The Young Karl Marx” follows a 26-year-old writer, researcher and radical named Karl Marx as he embarks, with his wife Jenny, on the road to exile in an age that has created both new prosperity and new problems.
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Utopia and inequality
Economic inequality is arguably the crucial issue facing contemporary capitalism—especially in the United States but also across the entire world economy.
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Janus and fair share fees
Over the last decade, a number of cases attacking the rights of public-sector union members have been quietly working their way through the courts and, finally, up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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What can Noam Chomsky’s co-author teach us in the age of Trump?
The story goes that Einstein’s theory of relativity began with a simple question: What if a person could sit on a beam of light? A single inquiry led to an entire field of study, and perhaps the world’s most famous scientific breakthrough.
The late Ed Herman’s questions were less playful. They were about war and death, lies and power politics, but they too created entire areas of study. If properly considered, they can even guide us through the perilous age in which we’re living.