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Halt and Catch Fire’s Surprising Finale: The Show Was the Opposite of What We Thought

Willa Paskin Slate
With AMC's Halt and Catch Fire's second season arriving soon, a reflection on the first. Halt and Catch Fire's finale reveals it was anti-capitalist all along. For all the early technical bells and whistles, Halt has a straightforward, pleasing story arc—a ragtag team that against long odds and many obstacles does the near impossible—that toward the season’s end ran into a genuinely thought-provoking hurdle: capitalism.

Behind the White House’s Sanctions Against Venezuela

Mark Weisbrot CounterPunch
The latest sanctions, like the ones approved in December . . . represent a victory for a political faction that wants to prevent the normalization of diplomatic relations with Venezuela. It was not a result of pressure from the right in Congress, but came from deep within the Obama administration.

This Jay Is Evolving in a Very, Very Weird Way

Matt Simon Wired
Being on the way to becoming a new species isn’t the same thing as actually speciating. Actual speciation without isolation is quite rare, and even the Santa Cruz Island jays have not actually speciated, and may never even do so. But the implications for long-held evolutionary principles are intriguing. Darwin’s famous Galapagos finches certainly prove that isolation leads to speciation, but now it may be that isolation isn’t always necessary to get species to diverge.

The U.S. in the Middle East: A Remarkably Rich Menu of Foreign-Policy Failures

Charles Freeman, Jr., Middle East Policy Council
In a recent speech, noted retired U.S. diplomat, Charles Freeman Jr., offers a frank assessment of the “remarkably rich menu of U.S. foreign-policy failures” in the Middle East. Most, he says, are due to America’s noisy but strategy-free approach, adding, “don’t just sit there, bomb something” isn’t much of a strategy. But, to cure the dysfunction in U.S. Middle East policy, Freeman says, we must cure the dysfunction and venality of our politics.

Israel’s Left Must Grab the Outstretched Hand of Its Arab Citizens

Haggai Matar and Yael Marom +972 Magazine
With 14 seats, the Arab Joint List became the third-largest party in the next Israeli Knesset. But Israel’s Jewish majority, disdaining the outstretched hand of the Arab minority, soundly rejected the Joint List’s message against racism and division and for equality and democracy. Consequently, in the election aftermath the Israeli Left must prioritize the Jewish-Arab partnership as it confronts a wave of racist legislation and policies.