China’s Youth: Do They Dare to Care about Politics?
Young people in China are divorced from their country’s recent history. With no memory of Mao Zedong, they can glean little from a censored environment. Their parents, by and large, don’t talk about their experiences {…}
Austerity and the Unraveling of European Universal Health Care
A great human disaster is now unfolding in the Eurozone countries that have agreed to slash spending, wages, and living standards. One facet of this story that has received too little attention is the effect of these measures on the health of these nations. {…}
The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington
The March on Washington was initiated not to break down racial barriers to voting rights, education, and public accommodations but to highlight “the economic subord-ination of the Negro” and advance a “program for economic justice.” {…}
Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity
For Zadie Smith, the time had come for the radicalism of experiment and the realism of political economy—for a new social realism that was capable of capturing both the mechanics and experience of today’s growing inequality. {…}
Chinese Workers Foxconned
Delivering flexibility and scale at rock-bottom prices, Foxconn keeps pounding out the very real underpinnings of the New Economy, remaking global manufacturing in its own image. Foxconn stands as the archetypal industrial firm for today’s planet of slums. {…}
Women’s Rights at Risk
A combination of factors in recent years has contributed to a fall in the status and material well-being of Chinese women relative to men. {…}
Land of Many Nationalisms
Increasingly, residents of the Chinese mainland, especially the middle-class urbanites who regularly go online, seek answers to questions like: Is it possible to be a Chinese patriot, while acknowledging one’s unhappiness with the status quo? {…}
Guest Workers As Bellwether
Guest workers are too often invisible in popular discussions of work; when they appear, it’s as outliers. But Saket Soni, who founded the National Guestworker Alliance amid the New Orleans’s post-Katrina guest worker influx, says they’re better understood as a bellwether. {…}
Open Letter to the Parties: Time for the Neo-Dissidents
No liberal democracy, political party, market economy, or human right is set in stone. People created these concepts, and people have the power to destroy them. These social constructs are often elevated to the rank of universal laws or endowed … {…}
Between Dignity and Human Rights
Books and Articles Discussed in this Essay:Dignity: Its History and Meaning, by Michael Rosen (Harvard University Press, 2012) A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by Mary Ann Glendon (New York: Random House, 2001) … {…}
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Unfair Hike: Brazilians Protest Rising Public Transit Costs· June 18, 2013 ·
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Partial Readings: Whistleblowers and Job Security· June 17, 2013 ·
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Belabored Podcast #10: Whose Walmart?· June 14, 2013 ·
