Why the Red Cross hasn’t been as effective as small community groups when it has come to disaster relief post-Sandy: The real problem with the Red Cross was not that it was stretched thin, but rather that it was simply too big, and its people too inexperienced in disaster recovery, to be able to respond […]
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The Occupiers: A Liberal and a Radical Struggle for the Soul of a Movement
The stories of Daniel Murphy and Ben Zucker, two participants in Occupy Wall Street who are still looking to define what the movement is all about: “At 23, Zucker has the organizing gene. He’s a fresh graduate of Tulane University, where he studied public health to get a foot in the door of social justice […]
The End of Wall Street as They Knew It
[Not single-page.] Financial reform has been more successful at changing Wall Street’s business than many imagined—and the public outcry from Occupy and elsewhere has led to some soul-searching: “For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. ‘After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?’ an […]
The Struggle For The Occupy Wall Street Archives
Bold said he had this sense early on in his involvement in OWS. And inspired by a presentation he’d seen at NYU about the collection of artifacts after the September 11th attacks, he decided to get serious about collecting immediately. He told people he knew in the movement to save their writings and signs. He […]
Pre-Occupied: The Origins and Future of Occupy Wall Street
This is how Occupy Wall Street began: as one of many half-formed plans circulating through conversations between Kalle Lasn and Micah White, who lives in Berkeley and has not seen Lasn in person for more than four years. Neither can recall who first had the idea of trying to take over lower Manhattan. In early […]
David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street
Graeber’s arguments place him squarely at odds with mainstream economic thought, and the discipline has, for the most part, ignored him. But his timing couldn’t be better to reach a popular audience. His writing provides an intellectual frame and a sort of genealogy for the movement he helped start. The inchoate anger of the Occupy […]
The Class War Has Begun
What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-American optimism, but at each aftershock […]
Why Should We Demonstrate? A Conversation
LOGAN: So it’s not necessarily the idea that media coverage of this event will make anyone that has any power change anything, but that it will inspire us to change stuff ourselves? SAM: I mean, partially. Anything like this always has 500 million different goals and other things that it’s going to accomplish without even […]
The End of the Line: A Microbus Map of Damascus
Matthew McNaught | Syria Comment | June 2013 | 18 minutes (4,615 words) Matthew McNaught taught English in Syria between 2007 and 2009. He now works in mental health and sometimes writes essays and stories. This piece first appeared in Syria Comment, and our thanks to McNaught for allowing us to republish it here. 1. Here is a […]
LOGAN: So it’s not necessarily the idea that media coverage of this event will make anyone that has any power change anything, but that it will inspire us to change stuff ourselves? SAM: I mean, partially. Anything like this always has 500 million different goals and other things that it’s going to accomplish without even […]
