Clik here to view.
Wanna fit in? Burn the witch!
While every journalist and blogger is happy to put his or her own political slant on the motives behind Rachel Dolezal’s chronic, pathological lying, few seem to consider that Dolezal may in fact be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Matt Taibbi’s Vision of Justice, Part III
Matt Taibbi’s The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap jumps between stories about the tribulations of the poor and the brazen predation of the super-rich. Having read and recounted...
View ArticleClik here to view.
White Terror: Symbolic or Institutional?
Since the mass murder at Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, seven historically black churches have been torched, as have innumerable Confederate flags. Only one of these types of arson,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Representative Democracy is a Waste of Time
Greece is, in many ways, representative of the world right now. Its economy is floundering due to, among other things, bad loans taken out by self-interested ruling parties aided and abetted by Goldman...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jane Jacobs: Intuition vs. Evidence
After having read countless authors who cite Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and having intuitively come to many Jane Jacobs-esque conclusions on my own over the years, I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Black Panthers: Revolutions and Dinner Parties
I recently watched Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution. While the documentary is clearly pro-Panther, I nevertheless found it to be a surprisingly critical examination of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Eyes on the Street
Perhaps Jane Jacobs’ most acclaimed contribution to urban studies in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her “eyes on the street” theory. “[T]here must be eyes upon the street, eyes...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Modern Debtor’s Prisons: A Brief Update
Last year, I read and posted about an article in The Nation that highlighted a growing trend: private companies commissioned to collect fines from low-level criminal offenders who were in arrears. The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Previewing the Supreme Court’s New Term
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern’s recent Slate.com post offers a brief preview of what’s to come this term in the nation’s highest court. For readers with a liberal bent, the news may be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Halloween as Social Movement
In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Holt Paperbacks, 2007), Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the evolution of carnivals; from tribal societies masking and dancing to manufacture...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Narrative, Performance, Selves & Solitude
Nothing is more fascinating — and frustrating to others — than our capacity to manipulate the image or story we present to others. In an acute way this capacity to pretend or impersonate raises the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Will Anyone Face Criminal Charges for the Flint Water Crisis?
Residents of Flint, Michigan continue to be subjected to dangerously high lead levels in their drinking water. The long-term effects are likely to be catastrophic, especially when it comes to the brain...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Technology in the Age of Inequality
Last week, I attended the Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education symposium at NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication department. One panelist, NYU Sociology’s Richard Arum, addressed the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Privacy and Power
Two weeks ago I wrote about the relationship between privacy and power, and how may of today’s spokespeople for the oppressed focus more on stopping surveillance in the name of privacy than daring to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In Search of Prosecutorial Ethics
I am reading about legal news out of North Carolina, but perhaps not the legal news you’re expecting. Rather, I am reading Radley Balko’s Washington Post blog in which he discusses a proposed rule for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fascism American Style: Il Duce, Il Donald
As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
White Terror: Symbolic or Institutional?
Since the mass murder at Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, seven historically black churches have been torched, as have innumerable Confederate flags. Only one of these types of arson,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Representative Democracy is a Waste of Time
Greece is, in many ways, representative of the world right now. Its economy is floundering due to, among other things, bad loans taken out by self-interested ruling parties aided and abetted by Goldman...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jane Jacobs: Intuition vs. Evidence
After having read countless authors who cite Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and having intuitively come to many Jane Jacobs-esque conclusions on my own over the years, I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Black Panthers: Revolutions and Dinner Parties
I recently watched Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution. While the documentary is clearly pro-Panther, I nevertheless found it to be a surprisingly critical examination of...
View Article