A cocktail of elite arrogance and naivete across the Anglophone world, combined with the support of billionaires like Sam Bankman-Fried, produced effective altruism. The result has been reactionary, often racist intellectual defenses of inequality.
Today brought mass strikes against Emmanuel Macron’s “retirement reform” in France. Increasing both the pension age and the number of years workers have to work, the planned measure will see more French people die before they get any retirement at all.
Palm oil is in everything: what we eat, wear, read, drive. And like so much else that we consume and can’t disentangle ourselves from, palm oil is enmeshed in global supply chains that rely on brutal working conditions and the destruction of the planet.
Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro thinks he’s distilled political legitimacy into a mathematical equation. He’s only succeeded in proving that he’s very confused.
Inflation is hurting workers, but bosses are doing just fine. In Canada, average CEO pay in 2021 was 243 times the average workers’ wage, up from the pre-COVID record set in 2017.
Mishandling classified documents, as both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are now accused of doing, is just one type of crime for which America increasingly has one justice system for the rich and powerful and another, far harsher system for everyone else.
Through wars, pandemics, political crises, and financial collapses, neoliberalism continues to reinforce the wealth and power of a small global elite. That elite’s high-minded posturing at Davos this week will do nothing to change that.
The Right plans to seize on the debt ceiling to ram through unpopular ideas. The strategy could force Democrats to choose between government paralysis or draconian cuts to the federal budget — possibly even Social Security and Medicare.
At the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos this week, elites will try to address problems from climate change to the threat of worldwide recession. But these elites’ endless thirst for profit created these problems — and will doom their efforts to fail.
There’s a real dearth of Hollywood adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. Unfortunately, The Pale Blue Eye is far from the film that Poe deserves.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case with high-stakes consequences for the labor movement. Corporate lobbying groups are pressuring the court, vilifying unions as violent and harmful so as to combat the national labor organizing surge.
The New Deal brought a generation of leftists into the federal government. But Red Scare anti-communists purged these radical bureaucrats or forced their politics rightward — blocking more far-reaching reform and distorting our understanding of the New Deal.
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes in Jacobin that if we are to confront properly the threat of a catastrophe, we must embrace a new notion of time.
Rather than uncovering the dark secrets of the royal family, Prince Harry’s new book, Spare, embodies its worst traits. It’s a monument to a culture of narcissism and cruelty cultivated by a family completely unaware of the lives of ordinary people.
Critic and philosopher Herbert Read was a contradictory figure — an anarchist and a knight, a lover of medieval art and industrial design — but at the center of his work was the belief that we can all be artists.
On Martin Luther King Jr Day, rather than embracing a sanitized, deradicalized King, we remember a committed foe of not only racism, but economic inequality and militarism.
Ontario sits directly north of the US, giving it an unimpeded view of just how disastrous American health care is. But Doug Ford’s government is ignoring this warning and pushing through for-profit privatization schemes in the province’s hospitals.
For Democrats, taking a stand for democracy requires prosecuting coup plotters wherever and whenever they show their seditious faces. This rule holds fast except for in Bolivia, where prosecuting coup plotters apparently amounts to authoritarianism.
Protests in Peru following the impeachment of Pedro Castillo show no signs of letting up. In the face of lethal repression, protesters are no longer just demanding elections but the resignation of President Dina Boluarte and a new constitution.
Many oligarchs are convinced that eternal life is a class birthright. It doesn’t matter that the elixir of life everlasting is likely a fantasy — it’s the quest itself that results in social and legal architecture that gives the rich unacceptable power.