After Milton Friedman published a 1975 compilation of writings titled There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, the phrase (lifted from Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel about a lunar penal colony) became something of a libertarian shibboleth. For Friedman, the “free lunch myth” was epitomized by the ostensibly “free” goods and services provided by the […]| n+1Articles – n+1
Semiotically, it's detached from all these kinds of things that it was originally designed for. But this kind of sign was always part of the corporate blandification of the American travel experience. The idea of the app is funny, because it turns out that apps are all like these highway signs, really. Like you're traveling on the information superhighway when you're on your phone.| n+1Articles – n+1
In a majority-homeowner nation, the rental crisis alone cannot explain Harris’s defeat, especially since the concentration of renters in cities means that as a group they likely still tilted toward her. But the demographic overlap between tenants and those who moved away from Harris cannot be ignored. Moreover, the failure to adequately address the housing crisis exemplifies the fecklessness that doomed Harris’s campaign. Any effort to challenge Trump and the reactionary forces he spearhe...| n+1Articles – n+1
I increasingly wonder how often we've labeled protesters as “anti-globalization” who were, in fact, advocating for alter-globalization, and were critiquing the lack of labor or environmental protections in major international trade agreements, or in WTO decision-making processes, and so forth, but were not necessarily opposed to economic interdependence. So on top of the critiques of the decolonizing world and the Global South, we also see this reinvestment of grassroots energy from the l...| n+1
To be free is to be a subject instead of an object, to be able to act decisively in the world rather than only to be acted upon. For Du Bois, as for young people in Gaza and on college campuses around the world, by attempting to create a new freedom in the world, they came to know the world as it was; with some courage, they could imagine it as it could be.| n+1Articles – n+1
Today anti-China policies are a rare point of bipartisan consensus. Popular opinion on China has steadily soured since the 2000s, first among business owners, then the public. Pew polling shows that some 80 percent of Americans view the country unfavorably, a historic low. Enrollments in Mandarin courses at US universities, which climbed steadily after 1978, have been falling since 2013.| n+1Articles – n+1
None of the following receives a substantive assessment in When the Clock Broke: NAFTA, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America,” Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton’s political career, George W. Bush, the 2000 election, September 11, the war on terror, the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, the 2008 global financial crisis, Barack Obama, the Tea Party, the legalization of gay marriage, the presence of the Minutemen ...| n+1Articles – n+1
If the government is good for business, why destroy the government? It’s possible Musk really believes he is saving the American economy. By all accounts a fervent believer in whatever he currently believes in — stopping climate change, colonizing Mars, juicing up global birth rates — Musk may be speaking in earnest when he claims that government bloat is ruining the country.| n+1Articles – n+1
Perceptive critics noted early on that Serra’s sculpture only made sense in relation to its time and place and gave meaning only to those specific conditions against which it unfolded. Serra insisted on as much himself. We might apply such a phenomenological approach, or better yet, a deambulatory one (as the very eminent art historian Yve-Alain Bois proposed when both of their careers were still in their youth, in 1983), to the work as a whole: a “picturesque stroll” through the landsc...| n+1Articles – n+1
What scares them is something else: the realization spreading across Los Angeles that the private housing market isn’t just failing wildfire victims—it’s failing by design. That the inability to meet this moment isn’t the result of a few bad landlords, it’s a feature of a system built to extract. What landlords fear is that we might imagine something better: a world where housing isn’t a commodity at all, a world without landlords.| n+1Articles – n+1
Wracked since November by a crisis of confidence, Democrats have repeatedly defaulted to autopilot in ways that embody this ethos. In Congress, that means deference to seniority and aversion to perceived risk. Democrats have been much kinder than Republicans to leaders atop their party’s caucuses. In bureaucracy, it means reverence for procedural niceties. The path of least resistance even gets celebrated as a positive good: look at us, following the rules.| n+1Articles – n+1
Like Critical Race Theory before it—but with a supercharged intensity, since each new campaign of right-wing hate has been more aggressive than the last—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has come to stand in for efforts and programs that have nothing at all to do with these words’ putative definitions or implications. The DOGEistes, in combing through personnel data on the hunt for “women,” “historically,” and “status,” have made it very clear that they’re not particularly ...| n+1Articles – n+1
Decenas de millones de trabajadores quieren un sindicato. La encuesta nacional más reciente, de 2017, concluyó que casi la mitad de todos los trabajadores no sindicalizados en Estados Unidos se afiliarían a uno si pudieran.| n+1
Labor’s future will also be decided by its response to a reactionary political climate, and whether it can overcome two sinister and mutually reinforcing dynamics that are now at play in the movement: opportunistic collaboration with Trumpism along narrow sectoral lines, and the embrace of an “America First” nationalist agenda targeting immigrant workers. Left unchecked, these forces promise to further fracture labor by dividing native from immigrant workers, and to consolidate a tenuou...| n+1Articles – n+1
“When did we beat Japan at anything?” Trump railed in 2015. “They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time.” Commentators at the time laughed at Trump’s Japan fixation. They called it “anachronistic,” “out-of-date,” and “odd.” But Japan has in fact been foundational to Trump’s worldview, as historian Jennifer M. Miller has argued, dating back to his...| n+1Articles – n+1
You can almost hear the chattering class’s chattering teeth as they balance the need to generate clicks with their sanctimonious shock at the public’s hatred for Brian Thompson, the company he ran, and the industry he represents. Mangione (allegedly) took a straight shot at capital, and now popular ire is being directed at CEOs rather than Congress, the free market rather than the immiserating state. This won’t do.| n+1Articles – n+1
A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses. Customers who held onto their DVDs for longer meant fewer shipping costs for Netflix, and fewer DVDs for the company to manage and store. Netflix tracked heavy users of its service — labeling them internally as “pigs” — and secretly throttled their deliveries. It didn’t matter if Netflix rented fewer DVDs than Blockbuster,...| n+1
By themselves, strong growth and low unemployment cannot wash away social divisions, any more than they can empower labor enough to substantively increase wages, to say nothing of raising the labor share of national income. The left must not be cowed into a narrow politics of income inequality and redistribution; it must look further, toward democratic control of capital itself.| n+1
As the ascendant far right attempts to assert its hegemony, it has identified universities and academics as important obstacles to its success. In this, the enemies of academic freedom and scholarly inquiry are correct. But it is not enough only to defend the institution from the intensifying siege: our divisions are magnified in defensive struggles, and the terms of debate, such as they are, are set by those who’d burn the libraries down if they could. It is only by going on the attack, an...| n+1
It is now crystal clear to me that we must pivot our strategy and get on offense. We need to articulate and fight for what we want the university to be, and we need to create targeted campaigns to achieve it.| n+1
Deep in the product reviews for a pair of $15 gray sweatpants, one commenter writes, bafflingly: “I love these grey sweatpants ever since i received them out of the shein package. They go with almost everything and nice and baggy on my body. The color is easy to wash and can go with coloreds and whites which is very helpful in laundry.” Below, three photos are attached. They show three different women in three different pairs of pants, none of which match the product listing.| n+1
The movement in Atlanta is not exceptional for either its militancy or its broad-based community organizing. It is exceptional for fusing these elements in the midst of a relatively depoliticized period of “restoration,” and for doing so in a durable way.| n+1
Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening.| n+1
Dodging huge grilles we walk on, pulled by ugliness toward a gentrified retail strip. Here the violence of the new ugliness comes more fully into focus. The ruling class seized cities and chose to turn them into . . . this?| n+1