A Deadly Business: Big Tobacco Still Sees Big Profits in America's Poor

Jessica Glenza The Guardian
With friends in the White House, and a pending $49 billion merger, Big Tobacco is back. The US remains the “world’s largest tobacco profit pool” outside of China, with “exciting” prospects for “long term growth”. Mergers and acquisitions have allowed the deadly industry to squeeze huge profits from customers, increasingly the poor, less educated and marginalized, and the supply chain, contract farmers, and workers, including children, who work for poverty wages.

Secret Agent

Philip St. Clair Pedestal Magazine
With its surreal twist on death, birth, and reincarnation, the poet Philip St. Clair reminds us that some memories we don’t ever want to hear again.

Obamacare Is Only 'Exploding' in Red States

Dean Baker Los Angeles Times
Because Republicans have been so successful in keeping many of their residents from getting insurance, they think the country should trust them to overhaul heath care.

Trump and the Truth About Climate Change

Joseph E. Stiglitz Project Syndicate
One of the world’s best-performing economies, Sweden, has already adopted a carbon tax. And the Swedes have simultaneously sustained their strong growth without US-level emissions.

Why Are We The Only Humans Left?

Not so long ago, homo sapiens shared the planet with close relatives, including Neanderthals. Who were they, and what happened to them?