Tag: capitalism

“It might not seem like the right time to talk about plastics…But it is. And the world doesn’t have a moment to waste.”

Against the commodification of community.

“You may start off with Professor X but Magneto got a fucking point.”

“Once the love-language of a brand to its audience, the place of a modern mascot has never been less sure-footed.”

Moe Tkacik reveals the web of shadiness lurking behind WeWork’s facade.

I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free… to be reduced to a uterus and some boobs! Good times.

She gets a mansion and she gets a boat and she gets a jet! And you get to suffer and then maybe pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you’re lucky enough and bare enough of your private pain.

From global capital to YouTube, carbon credits to indigenous land defenders in their own words, Will Meyer has compiled a reading list on who lit the match and how the fire might be stopped.

Anne Boyer encounters a familiar system — that grand and easy-to-mistake-for-everything system — at the cancer pavilion.

If the most financially and critically successful artists don’t feel successful, maybe there’s something wrong with how we think about success.

In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.

What’s at stake in the fight over development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? A caribou herd, and a culture that relies on it.

Celebrities act as a symbol of capitalism. When we question it, we question them too.

“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”

Recent books by economists who hope to “save capitalism” dismiss popular ideas as “just politics.” But why assume the popular is the enemy of the good?

“Instead of homes, we live in commodities.”

Looking for an Instagrammable way to spend your Saturday? Mediate your imagination through the forced whimsy of the Dream Machine.

David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” and Alison Green’s “Ask a Manager” offer differing views — and some good advice.

A political art project calls for everyone to wear nondescript coveralls.

“Off-peakers” try to save time and money by avoiding a 9-to-5 schedule.

“Freedom” is just another word for being under the thumb of a powerful white man — for now.

A nation skilled in exploiting tax loopholes aims to be the first to make money from asteroid mining.

Aztec priests ripped out people’s hearts daily as a sacrifice to the sun, and for Sam Kriss, the contemporary West might be a lot more like them that we think.

The emerging science of epigenetics argues that poverty can change our genetic expression.

Contemplating history, family, and today’s America, Dane A. Wisher tells the story of spreading his father’s ashes on the battlefield at Gettysburg National Park and coming to terms with his life and death.

Ubiquitous digital payments: harbinger of a glorious future, or smokescreen for powerful interests that want to control (and undermine) choice and capitalism?

In Little Atoms, JP O’ Malley tells the story of the Irish nuns who a multi-million dollar corporation exploited to help produce its toys.

Long after winter has ended, hating on Christmas remains popular sport, as much a holiday tradition as eggnog and overspending.

What Marx got right—and wrong—about capitalism:  The most obvious mistake in his version of the world is to do with class. There is something like a classic Marxian proletariat dispersed through the world. But Marx foresaw that this proletariat would be an increasingly centralised and organised force: indeed, this was one of the reasons it […]