Last night’s This American Life featured a show about the working conditions in China that are a direct consequence of our — the West’s — need for gadgets. And while one company alone is not to blame, this show examines Apple’s relationship with Foxconn.
Archive | Politics RSS feed for this section
The Subversive Education
Real education is subversive. It’s about nuance and irony — the challenging of the status quo. This is what I do.
Occupied?
Want to fix our current economic crisis? Start with higher education. I look at a root cause of America’s current class anxieties.
Occupy Wall Street Declaration
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
The Novel and the Order
Arguably, the dominant form of literature in the twentieth century was prose fiction, of which the novel was a titan, if not a god. Indeed, there is something god-like about the novel and its relation to western civilization’s sense of identity and order.
A Crisis of Interpretation
After September 11, 2001, the United States has arguably entered a continuum characterized by the capitalist drive to just do it. This is a zeitgeist that emphasizes action over thought — movement over contemplation. A trend toward anti-intellectualism had been growing since the last century, and the fact of terrorism seems to have been the final blow, toppling American thoughtfulness along with the twin towers.
Response & Revolution
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the digital age is its challenge to established systems of control. In many instances, monolithic media forms have encountered a wave of digital literacy that, tsunami-like, washes away political, social, and economic structures that have stood for years.