Control
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Noam Chomsky and the Public Intellectual in Turbulent Times
…[Noam Chomsky’s] many recent books, articles, and interviews have addressed how the new reign of neoliberal capital is normalized not only through military and economic relations but also through the production of new forms of subjectivity organized around the enslavement… Continue reading
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Cliven Bundy and the Sovereign Movement
While most observers and commentators have focused on Bundy’s recent statements on race, something far more problematic drives the standoff. Bundy, his family, and many of his supporters are part of the modern day Sovereign Movement, a loosely-knit group… Continue reading
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Welcome to the Edu-Factory Collective
We are amidst a great thaw, where the taboo topic of academic exploitation, once privatized and blamed on “failed” individual scholars, is being rendered unavoidable and recognized as a systemic and pervasive problem. More accurately, the university’s most vulnerable academic… Continue reading
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Magical Voluntarism
…magical voluntarism is also an indication of desperation. The Deal or No Deal situation is a horrible example of a more general situation. We have as little control over our lives as contestants do over what is in that box.… Continue reading
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Wolves of Wall Street: Financialization and American Inequality
It’s no secret by now that the recent spike in American inequality, and the gains rapidly accruing to those at the upper end of the income distribution ladder, are driven in large part by “financialization”—the growing scale and profitability of… Continue reading
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Subsidizing Walmart
“Walmart receives an estimated $6.2 billion annually in mostly federal taxpayer subsidies. The reason: Walmart pays its employees so little that many of them rely on food stamps, health care and other taxpayer-funded programs.” “Walmart avoids an estimated $1 billion… Continue reading
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Erik Davis on VALIS, P.K.D. and High Weirdness | Reality Sandwich
Great interview after the jump… As part of the inaugural reread series on Reality Sandwich, Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis and Nomad Codes, spoke with me recently about the “High Weirdness” of Philip K. Dick and the postmodern pink-gnosis of VALIS, a… Continue reading
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Reactions to ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ | Blog, Perspectives | BillMoyers.com
As Bill mentions in this week’s show, a lot of (digital) ink has been spilled over Piketty’s book. Reviewers have called it “a bulldozer of a book,” “magisterial,” “seminal,” “definitive,” “a watershed.” Below is a selection of reviews we think… Continue reading
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Enjoying the powerless features of Democracy
Not really all that amazing but it does make one want to say something facile like “amazing” . Plutocracy is alive and thriving while the great mass of citizens play at republican democracy, enjoying all the best features–like voting, a… Continue reading
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Finding Life After Academia — and Not Feeling Bad About It – NYTimes.com
According to a 2011 National Science Foundation survey, 35 percent of doctorate recipients — and 43 percent of those in the humanities — had no commitment for employment at the time of completion. Fewer than half of Ph.D.’s are expected… Continue reading
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The Future of Brain Implants – WSJ.com
What would you give for a retinal chip that let you see in the dark or for a next-generation cochlear implant that let you hear any conversation in a noisy restaurant, no matter how loud? Or for a memory chip,… Continue reading
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Barely Keeping Up in TV’s New Golden Age – NYTimes.com
The growing intellectual currency of television has altered the cultural conversation in fundamental ways. Water cooler chatter is now a high-minded pursuit, not just a way to pass the time at work. The three-camera sitcom with a laugh track has… Continue reading
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How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine | The Nation
Mechanical Turk is the innovation behind “crowdworking,” the low-wage virtual labor phenomenon that has reinvented piecework for the digital age. Created by Amazon in 2005, it remains one of the central platforms—markets, really—where crowd-based labor is bought and sold. As… Continue reading
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Burned, Bombed, Beaten
Education is under attack worldwide. The report issued by the United Nations speaks to conditions in the most physically violent locales around the globe. We should pay close heed to these. Because they are the physical counterpart of the psychosocial… Continue reading
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The good white folks of the Academy | Al Jazeera America
A particular narrative about slavery is told over and over: The institution was a historical aberration perpetrated by evil white people, but luckily there were good white people who listened to the black people, and they helped free the slaves,… Continue reading
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The “Deep State” – How Much Does It Explain?
…[T]here is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only… Continue reading
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