Society

The proposals were agreed on by members of the conservative, libertarian, and progressive teams participating in the NCC's earlier constitution drafting project.

The sound of gentrification is silence.

The sound of gentrification is silence. I didn't yet know that you don't live on an Ivy League campus. You reside on one. Living is loud and messy, but residing? Residing is quiet business. [...] I soon realized that silence was more than the absence of noise; it was an aesthetic to be revered. Yet it was an aesthetic at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were. Within a few weeks, the ...

“Cancel Culture” is perhaps the most useless but still over-used phrases in the lexicon of our ongoing culture war. More often than not, it’s used as a catch-all term that mutates…

Links to letters 1-6 within.

Among the great challenges posed to democracy today is the use of technology, data, and automated systems in ways that threaten the rights of the American public. Too often, these tools are used to limit our opportunities and prevent our access to critical resources or services. These problems are well documented. In America and around…

AI is unavoidable, but its deployment can be more nuanced.

Machine learning algorithms could be more accurate and reliable than conventional methods of predicting suicide risk.

At the Colorado State Fair’s 150th anniversary, Latinos express despondency for their city and country’s future.

The phone in your pocket cost $600, but that was two years ago, so now, it seems to be free and fully paid for. The upgrade has a slightly better camera and a slightly faster processor. Here’…

Disenrolled Nooksack citizens believe that the U.S.-Canada border, and legal metrics like blood quantum, ignore the nuances of pre-colonial Indigenous belonging.

How the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the longtime graveyard of regulation in the public interest, became its unlikely champion.

Big Noise Tactical Media was a radical media collective founded circa 1998 by Jacque Soohen and Rick Rowley. “Zapatista (1998), Black and Gold (1999), and This Is What Democracy Looks Like (2000), …

As Langston Hughes said in 1936, “Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America.” Antifa means anti-fascist. Do you believe in and support fascism? Do you beli…

The generator industry has touted automatic shut-off switches as a lifesaving fix for carbon monoxide poisoning. But the voluntary standard falls short of what federal regulators say is necessary to eliminate deaths.

With so many economic, political, and social problems facing us today, there is little point in focusing attention on something that is not one. The false fear of which I speak is the chance of US debt default. There is no need to speculate on what that likelihood is, I [...]

I could hear Meet the Press on in the background at my house on Sunday and the reporters were discussing various means of reducing the budget deficit. I didn’t bother to sit down and listen, however, because I knew that none of it made any sense. All were [...]

MMT is no longer limited to books and journals. It's being used to support policy proposals and is both lauded and attacked in the popular press. The latter has accelerated of late, particularly as spearheaded by several prominent economists. I argue, however, that they are missing the point.

History repeats itself, so the saying goes. It seems more accurate to consider that people repeat history and make choices similar to those others have made in the past. The continuity of choice is…

I woke up this AM to laugh my ass off over this commercial spoof from The Last Show with Stephen Colbert. It’s in response to President Biden’s proposal that all airlines be required to…

The Black Panther Party’s Franklin Lynch Peoples’ Free Health Center in Boston, ca. 1970 Men with guns. Armed community self-defense. Confrontations with predatory police departments. For many peop…

One way to serve the community is to see it as a market and solve one of its problems. When people choose to buy something, it’s ostensibly because the thing you sell is worth more to them th…