Skip to main content

How Radical Change Occurs: Eric Foner

Mike Konczal / Kevin Baker The Nation
Foner wanted to document his last time teaching the course, and he's teamed with edX to present it as three online classes. The themes running through his work—race in America, the influence of radicals on history, and economic oppression as a force of white supremacy—have never felt more relevant.

Greece Needs an Exit Option

Dean Baker Al Jazeera
Greece needs a viable exit option, both because it may actually want to go this route and also because it needs greater bargaining power with the troika.

Pension Bonds: State and Local Official Should Proceed with Caution

Aaron Kuriloff The Wall Street Journal
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback wants to make a decades-long bet that pension-fund returns will exceed current interest rates for taxable municipal bonds. “The use of pension bonds impugns an issuer more than a downgrade, because it shows they’re willing to saddle future generations with risk in order to make current budget discussions easier,” says Matt Fabian, a partner at Concord, MA-based research firm Municipal Market Analytics.

A Story of Drinkers, Genocide and Unborn Girls

David Bauer Quartz
Men now outnumber women on the planet by 60 million, the highest ever recorded. Preference for sons in India and China is driving the trend, but those two countries are not the only ones struggling with an imbalanced population.

Southern African Women Stand Their Ground Against Big Coal

Samantha Hargreaves and Hibist Kassa The South African Civil Society Information Service
More than 50 grassroots women activists from throughout Southern Africa met in late-January to coordinate their stand against the ravages of Big Coal, which includes sickness, displacement from stolen lands and food insecurity. The six-day strategy meeting, organized by WoMin, a regional alliance of women’s organizations fighting the impact of natural resource extraction, involved dozens of organizations in South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana.

Housing in San Francisco: Only Affordable for the Upwardly Mobile

Toshio Meronek AlJazeera America
In exceedingly expensive housing markets like San Francisco and New York, even the tools supposedly designed to preserve affordability for average working families, such as Below Market Rate set asides for supposedly “affordable housing,” are being used to benefit the upwardly mobile. San Francisco and other cities are effectively subsidizing upper-middle-class people to move in, paving the way for gentrification of historically low-income neighborhoods.

Charlie Sifford: The Jackie Robinson of Golf, Dead at 92

Mike Kupper and Nathan Fenno Los Angeles Times
Charlie Sifford, the man characterized as the Jackie Robinson of golf for his heroic efforts to break the racial barrier in this country's most segregated sport, died at 92 on February 3rd. Sifford rose from being a caddy in his home state of North Carolina to become the first Black player to gain membership in the Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA), which wasn't forced to drop its "Caucasians only" clause until 1961.

Why Are Reasonable People At War With Scientific Consensus?

Joel Achenbach National Geographic
We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge—from climate change to vaccinations—faces furious opposition. Some have doubts about the moon landing. Industry PR, however misleading, isn’t enough to explain why 40 percent of Americans accept that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts.

Friday Nite Videos -- February 6, 2015

Portside
The Super Bowl commercial you didn't see. The Black Panther Party: Vanguard of the Revolution. The worst trade deal you never heard of. A true story of fast food, immigration and justice. Diane Nash: A Bio.