
The Immortality Hustle
Silicon Valley’s quest to achieve eternal life is pure quackery. But it reveals much about the antidemocratic pathologies of the global superrich.

Silicon Valley’s quest to achieve eternal life is pure quackery. But it reveals much about the antidemocratic pathologies of the global superrich.

Christmas wasn’t always an apolitical holiday. During the Gilded Age, working-class Americans organized around a radical vision of Christ — until the Protestant establishment co-opted their energy.

Libertarians argue that capitalism is superior to socialism because in capitalism anyone is free to do anything — including start a worker cooperative. In truth, capitalism constrains our options, while socialism can liberate us to live as we please.

Today marks 125 years since the birth of Austrian-British economist Friedrich August von Hayek. He theorized the need to keep the masses away from the levers of state power — and did it in the name of defending freedom.

Far from a novel form of populism, J. D. Vance’s appeals are indistinguishable from the economic vision of the 1970s John Birch Society.

Burning Man wanted to escape capitalism’s ills. It ended up recreating them.

Last week, Amazon warehouse workers in San Francisco organizing with the Teamsters marched on the boss to demand union recognition. It’s one of many organizing efforts targeting the logistics giant that are gaining ground across the country.

Democratic Party leaders and their donors bear responsibility for the increasingly widespread view of trans rights as incompatible with a politics that benefits the many, not the few.

From monarchism to eco-fascism, internet subcultures have given rise to a new generation of “e-deologies.” Amber Frost dives into the meaning of Zoomer politics.

“Buy now, pay later” companies like Klarna present themselves as friendly, interest-free alternatives to credit cards. Consumer advocates warn that the services don’t have proper guardrails, leading to potentially dangerous consequences for users.

The War on Christmas isn’t fully a figment of Fox News’s imagination. But the villains are today’s capitalist Scrooges, relentlessly exploiting their workers with long hours and low wages through the holidays.

Donald Trump is rolling out a blitz of attacks on workers in hopes of paralyzing organized labor’s energy to fight back. But unions can only survive this onslaught by fighting, not by burying their heads in the sand.

Donald Trump is doubling down on his plan to buy Greenland. A US takeover could weaken the country’s mining laws and ban on private property, aiding Trump tech donors’ plans to profit from the island’s mineral deposits and build a libertarian techno-city.

Amazon helped fund Donald Trump’s inauguration. The retail giant and the insurer UnitedHealth waited less than a day to start begging the new administration to shut down their shareholders’ calls for transparency.

Since Donald Trump’s election, his opposition party hasn’t acted much like one. The same cannot be said of Bernie Sanders, who hit the road this weekend in red states in an effort to stoke pushback to Trump’s slash-and-burn plutocratic governance.

Corporate media has routinely downplayed the role of corporate profiteering in driving inflation, often citing industry talking points or providing no explanation at all for crippling inflation over the past few years.

Thousands of workers at the JFK8 Amazon warehouse voted to unionize in 2022, sparking hope that we were witnessing a turning point for workers. The egregious union busting by Amazon that followed should have been a rallying cry for Democrats. It wasn’t.

Most Giving Pledge dollars never reached the public, flowing instead to private foundations and donor-advised funds while billionaires grew richer, bought reputations for generosity, and handed back scraps to the people who made their fortunes.

The Federal Trade Commission has taken Amazon to court over monopolistic practices. The trial is demonstrating just how much market power the corporate behemoth wields — and that we probably need more than meager antitrust law to rein it in.

From the hypercommercialization of Kindle Singles to the fraught question of classifying book genres, Amazon has put its stamp on the literary field in ways large and small — but always in the interests of profit, says Mark McGurl, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon.