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"We [should] tell new stories of the dream, not the nightmares. We must describe where we want to go, such as happier lives, and better cities."
Dear Everyday Sexist,
Most of us will experience a mental health difficulty like depression, anxiety or addiction during our lives. And at some point, most of us will have a friend or family member who is mentally unwell.
On April 2, 2015, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired the documentary “Volunteers Unleashed” after a controversial reworking of the film in response to threats of litigation from Free the Children, the superpower Canadian non-profit run by the Kielburger family.
Prisons should not be profit centers
A more beautiful, egalitarian and regenerative world is possible. Take this library and use it to inspire global change!
Only a sweeping Constitutional amendment can save us from a global environmental disaster beyond our imagination.
Is there a belief about the Universe or about ourselves that causes all of the conflict in the world?
You don't have infinite money. Spend it on stuff that research says makes you happy.
Recent revelations have challenged the official version of Bin Laden’s death, but the real cover-up concerns the motivations behind the War on Terror.
How large is Africa compared to the United States, or Western Europe? Most inhabitants of the latter places might guess it is a little larger, but few would have any idea of the scale of the difference. This has led German graphics designer Kai Krause to produce this map to...
Boading, dubbed China's 'greenest city', is the world's biggest maker of solar panels and wind turbines, write Caleb Goods & Carla Lipsig-Mumme. But it's also has the country's worst pollution. Green energy, electric cars and the batteries that power them are great, but with...
I saw a dear friend a few days ago. I stopped by to ask her how she was doing, how her family was. She looked up, voice lowered, and just whimpered: “I’m so busy… I am so busy… have so much going on.”
If you’re suffering from ‘affluenza’ it’s time to recognize that you’re sick.
When you take a moment and look around at the world, things can appear pretty messed up. Take 5 or 10 minutes and watch the 6 o’clock news. Chances are, the entire time, all you are going to see is war, conflict, death, illness, etc. Sure, this is part of the mainstream...
This is a letter to my younger self - both the inner cynic and the idealist that secretly believes a more beautiful world is possible.
He cleans up after himself. He cleans up our planet. He is a role model for young men. He is rigorously honest and fiercely optimistic.
This seeking for security is inviting insecurity. Have you ever found security in any of your relationships? Have you?
On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom...
“The three most destructive words that every man receives when he’s a boy is when he’s told to 'be a man,'” —Joe Ehrmann, coach and former NFL player If we are honest with ourselves, we have long known that masculinity kills men, in ways both myriad and measurable. While...
The status quo is doomed but whether the future will be progressive or reactionary is uncertain, Hedges tells Salon
People who live in a traditional village — that means a community of about 150 people — are far better off than the rest of us.
Plastic is so ubiquitous that it can be found in or associated with nearly every tangible item in existence. Just think about how many different things you used today that either were plastic or came packaged in plastic, you’
We don’t have to pick sides in this movement. We are all on the same side. We are all on the side of justice.
Quite a bit changed for me over the first couple of years I started testosterone.
In record numbers, people are escaping regions plagued by warfare, instability, disasters, poverty, or systemic persecution. The United Nations announced last year that forced displacement had topped 50 million globally, and early tracking indicates that number may increase...
With virtually no police, crime or unemployment, meet the Spanish town described as a democratic, socialist utopia. Unemployment is non-existent in Marinaleda, an Andalusian village in southern Spain that is prosperous thanks to its farming cooperative.
Environmental photography is fast becoming one of the most powerful ways to call attention to issues about our planet, be it melting ice caps, city-leveling earthquakes or the innate beauty of our natural surroundings. Now the Royal Geographical Society is bringing together...
Even as the group has publicly celebrated its work, insider accounts detail a string of failures
The most difficult challenge facing humanity is not devising solutions to the energy crisis or climate crisis; rather, it is bringing stories or narratives of the human journey into our collective awareness that empower us to look beyond a future of great adversity and to see...
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) reports 2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US, totaling 6.8 million people, one of every 35 adults.  We are far and away the world leader in putting our...
On Facebook I quietly unsubscribe from friends who regularly make angry issue-related posts, even if they’re right. I don’t want to be pummeled by “truth,” no matter how true it is.
Go right now and check out John Nelson’s animations and have an epiphany . . . feel, maybe for the first time in your life, viscerally and emotionally connected to the pulse of life of planet earth. Then come back here. Are you back? Imagine be
Using NASA's latest high-resolution satellite imagery of Earth, datavisualization expert John Nelson has created a pair of captivating animations that track seasonal transformations on the blue marble we call home.
How Spain’s 15M movement went from occupying city squares to city halls—without compromising its independence When tens of thousands of people occupied city squares across Spain in the spring of 2011
“Give a man a gun and he’ll rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he’ll rob the world.”–Unknown
Sometimes it seems like we live in nonsensical times. Do you ever wonder what happened to good old common sense? Indigenous voices from around the world who are fighting for cultural survival and protection of nature in their homelands offer simple wisdom in the face of...
I went through a recent awakening where I realized that something very important has been missing throughout my entire life.
Nonviolence, peace, and justice are not utopian dreams but real and practical ways in which humans can affect the world around them.
Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called “the bourgeois mode of production.” He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the...
History shows us just how easily national borders can change, but we still like to think that they are permanent fixtures. These photos of different national borders around the world show you how nations like to fence - or not fence - off their turf. Borders will often say...
Most of us were taught as children never to talk to strangers. At face value this is bad life advice — we can never know people we never talk to. But we know it’s only meant to arm children with a basic skepticism about unknown people, so that they’re less likely to accept a...
People can say with conviction and confidence that voting will never make a difference - but it's still a belief, and possibly one that may be too ideological for our own good, as it can skew our perception of reality.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the presidential candidate for the Democratic nomination, has trouble being taken seriously by the corporate media, what with him being a democratic socialist and all. If you go to Google News and put in his name, you get headlines about him being...
A new film highlights the food waste problem. Here are some things we can do to fix it.
The word “Buddha” means to wake up. More precisely it means to see what is really going on (in other words, “dharma”), and understand that it has always been so. The Occupy Wall Street movement and its 1,000 offshoots worldwide is that kind of awakening. Its overarching theme...
We know our place in the world. We are the port of last resort, and have little to offer the Rohingya beyond a separate peace. Yet I write this with pride, in the hope that there will always be a cluster of islands southwest of the Pacific, where no ship in need is called...
The way that meat, eggs and milk are produced is surrounded by one of our great silences, in which most people collaborate. We don’t want to know, because knowing would force anyone with a capacity for empathy to change their diet.
FIFA's decision to hold the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar is drawing more and more criticism as more and more allegations of everything from bribery and financial mismanagement to slavery and deadly work conditions pile up. 900 workers have died during construction for the...
Maybe all this campaign talk about a Political Revolution will fade away.
We all know that class differences exist in society, but just how bad can it be? Auckland-based artist Toby Morris recently created an illustration breaking down the upbringing differences depending on socioeconomic status.
Just under a year ago, a group of activists, members of social movements, and progressive political forces in Barcelona presented our plan to take back our city council for the people at the May 24 local elections. We're Barcelona en Comú, and this Sunday we have a good...
Schools need to play a major role in developing and creating better humans than merely producing students. We need to question the norm of “Getting excellent results Vs. Being an Excellent human being”. There needs to be a balance in terms of both gaining knowledge and being...
Biodiverse ecological agriculture in women's hands is a solution not just to the malnutrition crisis, but also the climate crisis.
From the tar sands of Alberta to the Port of Seattle to the communities in the blast zone of oil trains, organizers across North America are calling for a "wave of resistance" this fall to "shut down the economic and political systems threatening our survival." Under the...
Media pundits, when they declare that Bernie won’t win, want us to believe that our history has been foreordained. The pundits, it seems, have been granted supernatural powers, powers that allow them to know exactly what the future holds for us. We need not bother creating...
Earthship is a concept of over 40 years and yet the first one ever built in Europe was in 2000. The idea is a trademark of Michael Reynolds — a US architect. In the 70s, Reynolds envisioned a home which would have three exciting traits — self sustainability, construction...
“Socialism” is considered a dirty word in the United States. Being a hard-working, “free market” capitalist is a part of our national mythology. But it wasn’t always this way. The socialist movement used to be quite strong in the early 20th century. There was even a socialist...
After a terrifying journey across the Mediterranean, thousands of migrants arrive in Sicily every week. These are their stories.
Study shows that modern hunter-gatherer tribes operate on egalitarian basis, suggesting inequality was an aberration that came with the advent of agriculture
Lots of people eagerly study all the polls and reports on how many people believe that climate change is real and urgent. They seem to think there is some critical mass that, through the weight of belief alone, will get us where we want to go. As if when the numbers aren’t...
No one should ever work.
The Revolution   Bernie Sanders is a socialist in the US Senate, the most deliberative, prestigious body of government in a nation that is at the helm of a global capitalist empire. It is an act of political genius for someone to have accomplished such a feat in an era of...
Not long ago, a Diné (Navajo) friend of mine, Lyla June Johnston, sent me a one-line email: “I am not going to Harvard… I am going to plant corn.”
The Facebook empire of 1.4 billion users just conquered new territory, unrolling a "partnership" to host articles from some of the most well-known news publications in the world, in a venture that critics warn poses a direct threat to independent media outlets—and the future...
Is religion the source of conflict, or are deeper problems to blame? Militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins compare religion to a virus which infects human minds and turns potentially rational people into dogmatic automatons, willing to kill and die for their beliefs. But...
It does not matter to the corporate rich who wins the presidential election. It does not matter who is elected to Congress. The rich have the power. They throw money at their favorites the way a gambler puts cash on his favorite horse. Money has replaced the vote. The wealthy...
A father from Ivory Coast wanted to reunite his son with the rest of his family living in Spain. But the Spanish government denied him a family reunification visa. Desperate, he paid a Moroccan woman to smuggle his 8-year-old onto Spanish soil. On May 7, 2015, she attempted...
“What struck me” journalist Christian Parenti said in a recent Truthout interview, referring to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, “was the fact that these local towns and states around the region were sending the only resources they had to New Orleans: weapons and...
The explosion of worker cooperatives in recent years has social justice organizers talking. Transitioning to a people-powered economy will require the work of many different social movements and worker co-ops have come to the center of the conversation due to their ability to...
The police—not to mention capitalism—have done far more to damage Baltimore than any riot could When Oscar Grant was shot by transit cop Johannes Mehserle in Oakland in the early hours of January 1, 2009, a week passed with no institutional response, while videos of Grant’s...
Whoever controls the price of oil can play god with the global economy - that’s why the US and Saudi Arabia are leading the way to smash OPEC and re-create a new global oil cartel “No one can set the price of oil,” said Saudi oil minister Ali
Recent scientific reports about climate change make grim reading. A paper published in The Economic Journal by the respected UK economist Lord Stern states that the models previously used to calculate the economic effects of climate change have been ‘woefully inadequate.’...
Following decades of research and hundreds of cross-cultural studies, psychologists have identified a number of consistently-occurring human values.
Hours after the Conservatives were re-elected, the government looked at cutting access to work schemes for the disabled. You'd think they'd at least have the decency to bring some flowers before shafting the vulnerable, but no. Not these guys. Not today. Today is not...
Projects and campaigns usually start because we feel inspired about an idea or passionate about a particular issue. Our first impulse is to throw ourselves into action straightaway. But if we take a little time to analyse the situation and to develop a plan of action we can...
1. Most people are motivated primarily by self-interest. As a creative community organizer, you are always trying to figure out people’s common self-interest, the glue that binds political organizations and movements.
Sometimes I find, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me and others feel, I have to speak the truth. We can use all the euphemisms we want, but the literal truth is that schools, as they generally exist in the United States and other modern countries, are prisons. Human...
Ferguson. New York. Baltimore. As cities erupt after decades of oppression and violence at the hands of police, calls for nonviolence can be deafening. “Violence isn’t the answer,” the moralists chide when protesters throw rocks and clash with police. They’re right. But...
Miasma Theory was universally held and horribly wrong. What else might we be wrong about?
Waiting for political change to come about once every few years at election time is not only frustrating, but is an almost sure-fire way of ensuring that the changes you really want don’t get delivered within the time frames that are necessary. If we really want to see...
Of the most commonly recurring themes that keeps popping up in the comments sections beneath my work is the "if only everyone stopped voting ..." type is probably the most infuriating.
Advocates say that resolution in Chicago must be placed in the 'broader context of ongoing and endemic police violence.'
"Land is the only real wealth in this country and if we don't own any we'll be out of the picture."
Thanks largely to Russell Brand, the question of whether to vote or not has been raised at national level this election.
It’s hardly surprising that Eddie Izzard, Alan Partridge and now even Russell Brand all want us to vote Labour.  They are the people the modern Labour Party represents after all.  Millionaires who feel a bit guilty about poverty and stuff but don’t want to change things too...
From Occupy to Ferguson, whenever a new grassroots movement arises, pundits charge that it lacks clear demands. Why won’t protesters summarize their goals as a coherent program? Why aren’t there representatives who can negotiate with the authorities to advance a concrete...
My Home, My Land is a graphic representation of much of the Oakland Institute's work on land grabs. Illustrated by the Institute's Intern Scholar, Abner Hauge, this publication dismantles the many myths promoted by so-called donor countries, development agencies, and...
Last week, as Baltimore braced for renewed protests over the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) prepared for battle. With state-of-the-art surveillance of local teenagers’ Twitter feeds, law enforcement had learned that a group of high school...
This week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Internet.org, its marquee project to “connect two-thirds of the world that don’t have internet access,” is now inviting any website or service to join the program. According to Zuckerberg, this change—which follows...
On March 26, without much fanfare or attention from U.S. media, the Spanish government ended freedom of assembly. In the face of popular opposition (80 percent of Spaniards oppose it), the upper house passed the Citizens’ Security Law. Under the provision, which goes into...
Some things are beyond measure and beyond price. No amount of money is enough to compensate for the loss of the sacred.
What are modern workplaces doing to people? Umair Haque suggests they are turning them into assholes.
The history of the world holiday on the 1st of May - May Day, or International Workers Day, held in commemoration of four anarchists executed for struggling for an 8-hour day.
We will have to consume less, not more, if we are serious about tackling climate change. So how do businesses like Coca-Cola lure us into forgetting that inconvenient truth?
Many years ago I pitched a magazine editor on a story about Bernie Sanders, then a congressman from Vermont, who'd agreed to something extraordinary – he agreed to let me, a reporter, stick next to him without restrictions over the course of a month in congress. "People need...
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