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Universities have become detached places for the pursuit of career advancement — a fantasy world in these turbulent times.
On the surface, things appear normal. The status quo of life in America circa 2016 isn’t to everyone’s liking, but at least the system is still working after a fashion. The price of oil is going up a bit: that means the cost of driving is also creeping higher, but steeper...
In her teens, strangers flashed her on the subway, teachers asked for hugs and boys joked about her breasts. Should she laugh off a lifetime of objectification – or get angry?
Last week a research wing of the International Monetary Fund came out with a report admitting that neoliberalism has been a failure. The report, entitled, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” is hopefully a sign of the ideology's death. They were only about 40 years late. As Naomi...
'Business leaders who refuse to look into the realities of their own supply chains are misguided and irresponsible.'
Climate change deniers like to style themselves as latter-day Copernicuses and Galileos, lone visionaries bucking the established wisdom of the ages embodied back then in the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Hear arguments from both sides and then vote in our poll
In facing up to the many profound crises of our time, we face a conundrum that has no easy resolution: how are we to imagine and build a radically different system while living within the constraints of an incumbent system that aggressively resists transformational change?...
A friend recently said to me, “Kyer, if I were in your financial situation, I’d be freaking out.”
My first impression at OuiShare Fest was a weird utopian blockchain mania: a poorly understood but massively hyped technology that will somehow fix all our social, political, and economic inequities. As I got to know some of the people here though, I started to see through...
To defeat the current upsurge in right-wing populism, progressives will need to disrupt, defuse, and – critically – compete for portions of its constituency.
One of my most popular courses at Swarthmore College focused on the challenge of how to defend against terrorism, nonviolently. Events now unfolding in France make our course more relevant than ever. (The syllabus was published in “Peace, Justice, and Security Studies: A...
The Tapajós River is one of the last free-flowing rivers in the entire Brazilian Amazon. But this river in the heart of the rainforest and the people and ecosystems that depend on it face a serious threat.
In the 1964 film classic, Dr. Strangelove, Slim Pickens is seen riding a nuclear bomb down to his certain death – and perhaps to the end of us all – while he calmly inventories his survival equipment.
We fail our duties as citizens if we remain silent about the realities of war
In the last few months basic income—an unconditional cash payment to every member of the population—has been getting more and more attention in the media and social networks. Three items are especially interesting.
“It finally clicked. I have bad self esteem when it comes to men.” — Journal Entry, October 27, 2015
Scientists are increasingly warning of the potential that a shutdown, or even significant slowdown, of the Atlantic conveyor belt could lead to abrupt climate change, a shift in Earth’s climate that can occur within as short a timeframe as a decade but persist for decades or...
“The horror... the horror...”—Apocalypse Now (1979)“You can’t show war as it really is on the screen, with all the blood and gore. Perhaps it would be better if you could fire real shots over the audience’s head every night, you know, and have actual casualties in the...
Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way...
Trump recently waffled about debating Sanders; he said he would for $10M to charity. He must not have expected the money to materialize. It did; and he bailed. But why? It would only weaken Clinton – which, as the presumptive nominee, Trump theoretically would want.
I’m dealing with massive cognitive dissonance right now. Multiple, contradictory beliefs and perceptions inhabit my mind, each compelling on its own terms. How do I choose?
Henry David Thoreau once wrote the words, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Though Thoreau lived in his cabin on the shores of Walden Pond many years ago, those words hold a deep truth. Wildness can mean so many different things to so many different people, but...
These days, feminism is on fleek. Touted by everyone from Dove to Barbie to Taylor Swift, consumer capitalism has made feminism sexy, fun, cool—and remarkably easy to claim as your own. But the price tag has been the meaning of the movement itself.
To build a lasting movement for climate justice, activists must decouple hope from victory and confront their fatigue head-on
“Yes, it looks bleak. But you are still alive now. You are alive with all the others, in this present moment. And because the truth is speaking in the work, it unlocks the heart. And there’s such a feeling and experience of adventure. It’s like a trumpet call to a great...
As part of our “New Systems: Possibilities and Proposals” series, Lane Kenworthy delves into a model for Social Democracy that he believes would be beneficial for a next system. Kenworthy claims that higher government involvement – as exemplified by Denmark, Finland, Norway...
Neoliberalism encourages us to treat every aspect of our lives as if it were on sale in a marketplace: is it an anti-spiritual project?
Progressive renewal lies in a deep recognition that we are not choosing our current lives.
It is a sunny April Saturday and I’m running late to an event. This itself is not remarkable – but this time it is because the street I’m looking for in Lambeth is not marked on my map. When I find the launch for Switched On London, I discover I’m not the only one puzzled by...
We can all feel it — the mental disease of late-stage capitalism is causing widespread depression, an epidemic of suicides, chronic feelings of guilt and shame, and a general malaise of powerlessness.
Parenthood lies deep within us. We are wired to help our little ones survive and prosper. Modern life, however, has removed us from our natural environment. It can be hard to raise a child in world of fear and distractions. Science and psychology bring back a big dose of...
Many changes happening around us remain unclear. We need better names and stories for them.
More than 1,500 community gardens have been started on vacant land in Detroit alone in recent years.
On Globalization and The Costs of Exporting the American Dream
Among climate change activists, solutions usually center on a transition to renewable energy. There may be differences over whether this would be best accomplished by a carbon tax, bigger subsidies for wind and solar power, divestment from fossil fuel companies, massive...
'What we want today is for this movement to spread,' says unionist.
The second thing NPR wants you to know about Hillary Clinton and foreign policy—after “she’s experienced”—is “she’s more hawkish than President Obama.” White House correspondent Scott Horsley (All Things Considered, 5/17/16) says:
In every community I visited, I found people working hard to lay a different foundation for our society.
1 I’m eleven years old. I’m in the deep end of a swimming pool, small wet hands fastened on to the pool ladder. My instructor bends over. “Let go,” she says. “I will,” I tell her. “Let go now.”
What gets you out of bed in the morning?
French logging company and official partner of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is deforesting a huge area of rainforest in southeast Cameroon without the consent of local Baka who have lived there and managed the land for generations
"My dad was an abusive alcoholic, or whatever. He'd go to the bar, come home drunk, find out I'd f-cked up at school, and he'd choke me out."
The Democratic party has done everything in its power to alienate me—and, I suspect, my generational peers of similar political proclivities. Let’s start with the Political Compass. Back in high school, quite some years ago, our Civics teacher had us take the Political...
Here’s an amazing fact: It’s 2016 and humanity is collectively moving toward a future that nobody wants. We are literally going somewhere that will hurt every single one of us. Mass extinctions are terrible things. Impoverished societies create the conditions for radical...
Regain your time, attention, and energy from the email machine.
Feeling trapped on the corporate ladder? You’re not alone… our work culture has become uncaring, toxic and rather dangerous to our well-being.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. — William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
I know it hurts — but what you are feeling (alongside millions of others) is the natural consequence of late-stage capitalism.
Lodged between two of the most populated countries on earth — India and China — Bhutan may be small at 700,000 souls, but it has a mighty role to play in showing the world how to preserve the environment, while also cultivating happiness in its human population. In fact, the...
"A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill." - Robert A. Heinlein
On May 13 the American news media reported that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had recruited U.S. Republican Congressman Kevin Cramer of North Dakota—a major oil drilling state—to help him draft his energy policy. Cramer has said he does not believe...
Brazil today awoke to stunning news of secret, genuinely shocking conversations involving a key minister in Brazil’s newly installed government, which shine a bright light on the actual motives and participants driving the impeachment of the country’s democratically elected...
Rahila Gupta meets the women fighters who are helping to stop the advance of ISIS while also leading a radical democratic charge against capitalist ideology. Welcome to the Rojava phenomenon.
I used to get made fun of for my big front teeth. Once, when I got home from school, I found my mom’s nail file and tried to file them down. The edge of the nail file caught on my lip after I sawed away for a few minutes and punctured a hole in my cheek. I sat there, crying...
As an Economic Hit Man (EHM) in the 1970s I spent a great deal of time in Panama. I hate to admit it, but I helped forge the system that has now been exposed in the Panama Papers. It is a system of legalized crimes. How else can we describe it?
There is nothing more difficult to plan, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the creator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new one.” —...
Masculinity is having a moment — but it's not a good one.
When famed New Zealander psychologist, Dr Paul Spong, was first invited by the University of British Columbia to study the sensory apparatus of killer whales at the Vancouver Aquarium, he no doubt thought his time with the cetaceans would be like his other experiments in the...
How to be there for the people who need you most
In the struggle for a more just society, we will be aided, not hurt, by our shared nature.
When was the last time you opened your laptop midconversation or brought your desktop computer to the dinner table? Ridiculous, right? But if you are like a large number of Americans, you have done both with your smartphone.
We have been told a great lie about capitalism — that everyone who works hard in life will be successful, make a lot of money, and have a good life.
In countless ways over the last 35 years, our society has become less economically equal and more dominated by corporate power. Less just and more jailed. Vast urban and rural areas decline as government subsidizes economic elites. Funds for education and social services are...
Is it weird to call Captain America an anarchist? Yes, yes it is. Of course, there’s a ton of different versions of the character throughout the canon, from the hyperpatriotic and jingoistic to the I-hereby-renounce-my-US-citi...
The president has reached the dubious milestone of being at war longer than any of his predecessors. And the conflicts aren’t ending anytime soon
The façade of democracy and the disempowerment of the citizenry by corporations has sparked a nationwide revolt. Elites, fearing unrest, will soon become ruthless. We must engage now in acts of sustained civic mobilization and civil disobedience or be crushed.
Death can be very painful and confusing. This is true for economic systems just as it is for personal loved ones. Moving on is just a hard thing to do. It’s really tough to work through all the difficult feelings we have about loss. Will I see my grandmother again? What am I...
What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection?
Between the mainstream media’s demonization of Donald Trump and the neocons jumping ship to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, a Clinton victory might prove grimly inevitable, but that will guarantee more neocon wars, says ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.
Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all.
5 ways water can heal the mind and body and help you tap into your most calm and creative state of being
Are we able to stop fracking and other threats to the environment from coming into our communities?  Are we able to protect local farming from sewage sludge or factory farming?  Are we able to protect workers and local economies from multi-national corporations?
FROM THE TIME we began reporting on the archive provided to us in Hong Kong by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we sought to fulfill his two principal requests for how the materials should be handled: that they be released in conjunction with careful reporting that puts the...
I’m writing this article in a whisper. There’s something about the topic of masturbation that seems especially scary to broach. There are friends that I have known most of my life that I have never really talked about this with – and if I have it’s been furtively, with a...
On final day of two-week Break Free mobilization, demonstrations take place in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Turkey, and beyond
Last weekend, Nuit Debout’s international working group organized two days of assemblies and action planning on the Place de la République in Paris. Some hundred people came from all over Europe and beyond to get to know this new movement in one of the heartlands of the...
'This spill shows why there is a new and vibrant movement in the Gulf of Mexico for no new drilling'
Official US defence and NATO documents confirm that autonomous weapon systems will kill targets, including civilians, based on tweets, blogs and Instagram
Hillary Clinton wants American voters to be very afraid of Donald Trump, but there is reason to fear as well what a neoconservative/neoliberal Clinton presidency would mean for the world
"Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia."
Depression and anxiety are rising rapidly among young people: what’s going on?
The heat burns hot between supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton this election. I’m a Sanders supporter and, like many of us “Bernie or bust” types — I lose sleep thinking about a possible Clinton presidency. Part of the defeatism we see in Clinton supporters
Masters of Mankind: American Power and the Challenges of 2016
Western consumer culture is creating a psycho-spiritual crisis that leaves us disoriented and bereft of purpose. How can we treat our sick culture and make ourselves well?
The year 2015 has proven to be another year of temperature records. Data released by NASA and NOAA (National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration) show that in 2015, the global mean surface temperature – the yardstick scientists use to measure air
Both parties ignored workers, spewed hate, enriched themselves, hollowed out democracy. Now the problem's populism?
The media  is wrong to characterise the issues surrounding the thousands of people attempting to travel into Europe as a ‘migrant crisis’, according to a briefing released today by campaign group Global Justice Now. Instead, attention should be drawn to the multiple crises...
"Boundaries" draws attention to the oppression of male entitlement that women feel on a daily basis in everyday life.
The towering canopies and dense understories of old-growth forests might be able to help protect biodiversity as global temperatures continue to rise, according to new research
Anonymous whistleblower says "Panama Papers are, if nothing else, a glaring symptom of our society's progressively diseased and decaying moral fabric."
In order to respond adequately, first we may need to mourn
With the largest evacuation in the history of the province of Alberta displacing nearly 100 000 people as large sections of Fort McMurray burn to the ground in the middle of a spring heat wave, it’s only natural for people affected to ask “why?” Why is this happening? What...
“How do we grow the economy?” is an obsolete question. Local initiatives across the world are looking for maturity instead as they rebuild caring, place-based communities and economies.
Bernie Sanders can't do it alone.
Greenpeace have leaked 248 pages of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiating texts, confirming worst fears of environmentalists and social justice activists
The world is a pretty screwed up place. So how do we fix it when we ourselves are broken? This is the question that rarely gets asked — and it is a keystone piece of the solution to all the global crises in the world. Global Warming? Can’t fix that and create healthy...
Capitalism is having a laugh at our expense. Surely that is the only reasonable explanation for the current shamelessness of Britain’s corporate elite. Having survived the financial crisis without the public, armed with pitchforks, hammering on their doors, perhaps they now...
People around the world are increasingly identifying as global citizens, according to a new BBC poll that shines a light on changing attitudes about immigration, inequality, and different economic realities. Among all 18 countries where public opinion research firm
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