Subjects Archives: Media

Let us slightly modify the question “who teaches the teacher?” and ask this of Marxism: If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker? Put another way: What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society?

With the Olympic Winter Games right around the corner, tension on the Korean Peninsula is again the focal point of international affairs. After months of increasing provocation between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump — highlighted by missile tests and sabre-rattling on both sides — signs of a rapprochement are emerging.

Scott McLemee reviews The Young Karl Marx, which, on the eve of 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, contains themes of economic crises and inequalities that remain relevant today.

The Washington, DC Public Charter School Board oversees some 120 public charter schools in the nation’s capitol, serving more than 43,000 students. And one member of that school board, John Goldman, is an MRA with clear white supremacist leanings. He has admitted to having an alter ego, “Jack Murphy,” under which he posted to websites and participated in debates.

We all know that Hollywood movies are fictional, right? Even the ones “based on actual events”? But at some level, if a fictional film references actual history and includes stunning visuals, great acting, and a powerful musical score, it can become accepted and internalized as “the truth.”

 “Congress Advances Bill to Renew NSA Surveillance Program After Trump Briefly Upstages Key Vote” was the headline on a Washington Post article. The lead described the bill as reauthorizing “the government’s authority to conduct foreign surveillance on U.S. soil.”

My view is that liberal critics of populism, standing on their heads, get it wrong. If made to stand on their feet, they’d have to admit that populism actually represents the failure of liberal democracy.

I had a friend who as a child wrote to Ursula Le Guin. He was feeling miserable, bad things had happened to him and he wanted to run away to Earthsea. He told her that he felt ashamed that he wasn’t facing up to life, felt it was a failing that he just wanted to live a fantasy.

On Sunday, the international press agency EFE did not have enough words to praise the not-even-that-new initiative of a Mexican “seduction school”, lamenting that this kind of workshop remains largely “taboo” in the country.

I was afraid that The Post would give us a Hollywood film version of the publication of the Pentagon Papers and manage never to say what was in the Pentagon Papers. I was afraid it would be turned into a pro-war movie.

Today, the United States Congress struck a significant blow against the basic human right to read, write, learn, and associate free of government’s prying eyes. 

When Amazon announced plans to locate a $5 billion, 50,000-employee complex as its second headquarters somewhere in North America, state governments and municipalities fell over themselves offering billions of dollars in tax abatements and corporate subsidies to secure the prize.

Noted journalist and filmmaker John Pilger’s collection of work has been archived by the British Library, but deep-rooted problems of Western media create an increasingly difficult landscape for ethical journalism, as Pilger explained in an interview with Dennis Bernstein and Randy Credico.

Behind the backs of the U.S. and world populations, social media companies have built up a massive censorship apparatus staffed by an army of “content reviewers” capable of seamlessly monitoring, tracking, and blocking millions of pieces of content.

It is time for George Monbiot’s legion of supporters to call him out. Not only is he a hypocrite, but he is becoming an increasingly dangerous one.

When we talk about generations, we tend to talk as if history has always been divided up into them. But the idea of distinct eras of cohorts each defined by some unique spirit is not timeless. The notion of a generation was borne of a conception of history as a machine of progress—a claim central to Enlightenment ideology

The recent controversies about Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics and Empire” project and UK Universities Minister Jo Johnson’s attack on “safe space culture” have both been defended on freedom of speech grounds. However, they are better understood as retrenching colonial thinking in universities.

Every airport bookstore features books with titles like 10 Ways to Retire Rich, 150 Places You Must Visit Before You Die, or 8 Easy Steps to a Flatter Tummy, with the numbers in very large type on their covers. They are the publishing ­equivalent of junk food, quickie books written to match titles that were invented by the marketing department to generate impulse purchases. The authors and publisher of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things must have had such books in mind when they chose its title and designed its cover.

The story of women’s prison growth has been obscured by overly broad discussions of the “total” prison population for too long. This report sheds more light on women in the era of mass incarceration by tracking prison population trends since 1978 for all 50 states.

In this article I wish to make a simple claim: 20th century advertising is the most powerful and sustained system of propaganda in human history and its cumulative cultural effects, unless quickly checked, will be responsible for destroying the world as we know it. As it achieves this it will be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of non-western peoples and will prevent the peoples of the world from achieving true happiness.