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Review: 'The Hunger Games' - Rebel Without A Cause

Marlon Lieber & Daniel Zamora Jacobin
The politics of The Hunger Games series aren’t as revolutionary as they’ve been hyped to be. Far from helping us reveal our most pressing contemporary problems, the liberal ideological message of The Hunger Games is that the major problems facing society today are state domination, dictatorships, and the restriction of individual liberties — in short, everything except for exploitation and capitalism.

Sidney Mintz: some personal memories

Marion Nestle FoodPolitics
The anthropologist Sidney Mintz has died at the age of 93. His book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, used sugar as an entry point into a critical analysis of social institutions, in this case slavery, race, class, and global capitalism. The book continues to be relevant to those concerns as well as to today’s obsession with sugar consumption.

Luke Cage in Context - The Racial Politics of an ‘Unbreakable’ Black Man

RACHEL A The Daily Fandom
Context is crucial to the politics of a narrative, always. In the context of the #BlackLivesMatter protests, and the increasing public focus on police brutality toward particularly African American communities in the U.S., it is important to ask how the fantasy of Luke Cage – a black man who is “unbreakable” – fits into the current socio-political landscape.

The Wall

Ally Malinenko Portside
Brooklyn poet Ally Malinenko offers a sardonic/graphic expose of East Germany's nostalgia for the old days.

Left Behind

Malcolm Harris Los Angeles Review of Books
It may be something of a stretch to claim, as Malcolm Harris does, that "anarchists get the artists and tacticians, Marxists get the theorists and politicians." Yet this remains an insightful review. It surveys the history of anarchism and its relationship to Marxism as it considers how adherents of these historic modes of thought might find themselves acting in this political year.

Cooking Behavior Close-Up

A. Elizabeth Sloan Food Technology
Although 44% of all consumers—and 84% of foodies—really enjoy cooking, easy-to-prepare foods are still the favorite for more than half (53%) of U.S. meal preparers.

Downton Abbey’s Final Season Points to More Equal World

Mary Pilon Bloomberg Businessweek
If the first five seasons of Downton Abbey—the British upstairs-downstairs soap opera that will have its sixth and final U.S. season premiere on Jan. 3—were about the structure of class divisions in English society, the last one is about those divisions crumbling.

Seamless

John Sweden Portside
New Zealand poet John Sweden describes life as "seamless," meaning that the human-made divisions of nationality, ethnicity, even bodily labels and ego, are part of seamless flow that transcends one's life. .

Joe Hill Again!

Paul Buhle Portside
The centennial celebration of Joe Hill's execution is being marked by concerts, symposiums, meetings and forums, and the publication of new books, or new editions. Labor historian Paul Buhle reviews two of these. Franklin Rosemont's Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, with a new introduction by David Roediger; and Philip S. Foner's The Letters of Joe Hill, with new material by Alexis Buss and foreword by Tom Morello.