Skip to main content

Inequality After Occupy

Penny Lewis Washington Spectator
In the years since the destruction of the occupations, the critique of inequality has only broadened and deepened in the U.S. Occupy should claim credit for getting it on the map, while political iterations old and new have been keeping it there. Today, the fight against inequality is taking greater institutional shape, and seemingly exerting more leverage, in places inspired by Occupy but moving beyond its initial tactics.

Remembering Tony Benn and His Five Little Questions

Michael Winship Common Dreams
Benn stood by his principles, even when they were damaging to his career and his party’s electoral ambitions. “Charming, persuasive and sometimes deeply frustrating,” is how former British Home Secretary David Blunkett described him to The Independent newspaper. “[But] what you would learn from Tony Benn was to think for yourself.”

Seattle School Teachers Boycotted Testing and Sparked A National Movement

Diane Brooks Yes! Magazine
Parents, students, and teachers all over the country have joined the revolt to liberate our kids from a test-obsessed education system. As the number of government-mandated tests multiplies, anger is mounting over wasted school hours, “teaching to the test,” a shrinking focus on the arts, demoralized students, and perceptions that teachers are being unjustly blamed for deeply rooted socioeconomic problems.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on "Cosmos," How Science Got Cool, and Why He Doesn't Debate Deniers

Chris Mooney Mother Jones
The stance of Cosmos, Tyson emphasizes, is not anti-religion but anti-dogma: "Any time you have a doctrine where that is the truth that you assert, and that what you call the truth is unassailable, you've got doctrine, you've got dogma on your hands. And so Cosmos is…an offering of science, and a reminder that dogma does not advance science; it actually regresses it."

The Apartheid of Children's Literature

Christopher Myers, Opinion The New York Times
Of 3,200 children's books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people, according to a study by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.

The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Bill Bigelow Zinn Education Project
Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.

On the Wrong Side of Globalization

Joseph E. Stiglitz The New York Times
Based on the leaks — and the history of arrangements in past trade pacts — it is easy to infer the shape of the whole TPP, and it doesn’t look good. We should accept the short-term pain, [some] say, because in the long run, all will benefit. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said in another context, “in the long run we are all dead.” In this case, there is little evidence that the trade agreements will lead to faster or more profound growth.