Category: Politics

Sitting next to me at a cafe was a purple-haired gentleman with a guillotine earring having a high-level discussion of historical fascism with a woman in her late fifties. As a Mennonite activist, I had just come from a book discussion of nonviolence, and I was sitting with my two kids. Fascism was, as usual, on my mind. So I introduced myself and struck up a conversation. The woman was a professor of Latin American history, and the man a professor of Russia and Polish history…

Meat space: the alternate reality to Zoom calls, texting, and Netflix. Do you all remember? Yes, we used to gather in person. This Nation article lays out how the Democratic party left behind meat-space, the work of building a membership-based organization: The Democratic Party was swept up in this civic transition. Today, the party focuses almost exclusively on election campaign sprints optimized for short-term mobilizing rather than for long-term organizing…

We find it easy to write what a man should not be, but it is impossible to write what a man should be without finding yourself saying things that cannot be said. To be a man is to take up the way of strength, for better or for worse. Men are not born, they are made. Any boy can be strong, but a man wields strength for the good of society. Manhood is conferred by a culture upon a boy, throughout history. For me, a good man is a farmer, not a raider. A protector, not a rapist…

This year saw social media bolster fake news and Trumpism. But what is salvaging social media, for me, is #MeToo. The stories I know are not mine to tell. But I have seen how resistant powerful men are to any sort of accountability, sexual or otherwise. I know that a lot of people feel nervous that innocent men will be pilloried with false charges of sexual harassment. I believe all people, victimized and abuser, need due process. But what is happening is a kind of glasnost…

In a world where patent companies control the world, Jack pirates drugs for the poor. In the course of cloning a productivity drug, she accidentally unleashes a wave of lethal addictions to banal tasks. But did she make a mistake cloning the drug? No. She learns that big-pharma company Zaxy is trying to expand their reach by addicting high-tech workers to a patented drug -- and to their jobs. As Jack races to engineer a cure, Zaxy deploys a military bot and a human partner to hunt her down and keep their trade secrets secret. Newitz has written a solid 4.5 star book…

Our brains associate neural regions that are architecturally close together. For many, the parts of our brain that give meaning to "Trump" are the same regions associated with Hitler, zombies, and evil capitalists like Lex Luthor. The more juice we put into those places, the more the currents try to leap across new synaptic gaps. To forge grand meanings and narratives…