*Noam Scheiber, the senior editor of The New Republic, says that much of the Haiti coverage is “redundant” and worries that the massive media onslaught is further complicating the recovery efforts. He proposes a “disaster pool” to deal with the problem: “Just like they do for White House coverage, the major (and some not so […]
I know that times are hard. I also know that many of you want to help the people of Haiti at this horrible time. Below are some organizations whose vital work you can support. The links will take you directly to the donate pages. It’s not the size of donation but the thought that counts. […]
In a recent interviews with MSNBC, Bloomberg and VentureBeat, PayPal co-founder and Slide CEO Max Levchin has discussed the development of social networks and similar online worlds as “self-enclosed economies,” in which all the normal economic rules can be made to apply in the new, burgeoning trade of virtual goods. He suggested that this is […]
Happy 2010, dear readers! May it be joyful and successful! We humans are impatient beings, so it is a natural that we seek crumbs about the future from East European fortune tellers in gloomily-colored headscarves, uptight Englishmen wearing purple ties and friend victims who know how to shuffle those Tarot cards. Here are some bold […]
by Nona Willis Aronowitz In November 2006, mere weeks after the death of my mother, radical feminist and journalist Ellen Willis, my friend Emma Bee Bernstein and I found ourselves contemplating what feminism meant to us. We were just 22, and we felt that the legacy of feminism was slipping through our fingers and that […]
The impact of the global financial crisis creates an illusion that there are real prospects for effective co-operation to reach long-term global goals. Despite China’s immaculate hosting of the Olympic Games and its inevitable rise to the global negotiation tables as a key decision-maker, reality forces her to come to terms with her own pressing […]
The Economist‘s recent special report on Brazil emphasized the country’s remarkable achievements in the last decade and applauded what it deemed its “take-off.” The magazine’s political leanings were evident in its reluctance to give proper credit to the leftist Lula da Silva government, choosing instead to describe Lula as a lucky leader who had benefited […]
*At the White House, President Barack Obama pardoned a turkey named Courage. Yes, even the pardoned turkeys must be inspiring. “Thanks to the interventions of Malia and Sasha—because I was planning to eat this sucker—Courage will also be spared this terrible and delicious fate,” Obama said, regaining his coolness points. *The day after Thanksgiving marks […]
The 20th century, characterized by perhaps the greatest blood-letting in human history, has shaped our reality in ways we do not understand. It was period defined by what Matthew White calls the Hemoclysm, a blood convulsion, bookended by atrocities in the Congo. Our last century was not about freedom, love and optimism: It was shaped […]
The announcement of Elinor Ostrom as a co-winner, along with Berkeley economist Oliver Williamson, of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics came both as a surprise and a breath of fresh air. None of the participants of Harvard University’s (informal) annual betting pool for the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics staked their claim […]
Congrats to the people of Rio de Janeiro on their city’s winning bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. It’s exciting and just plain fair that the Games will finally come to South America. Chicago will get over it. So will Oprah Winfrey, who still wields the power to send the entire population of Chicago […]
By Cordelia Rizzo I remember meeting Mexican politician and human rights activist Gilberto Rincón Gallardo seven years ago and hearing his story about his incarceration in the mythical Lecumberri prison. He was charged with throwing stones and “quickly running away from the cops” during one of the 1968 student-police confrontations. Gallardo, the first head of […]
By Geraldine Forbes and Usha Thakkar Dr. Neera Desai [Neeraben] one of the pioneers of Women’s Studies in India, died on June 25, 2009 after a long struggle with cancer. Neeraben, born Neera Druv in Ahmedabad in 1924, lived most of her life in Bombay/ Mumbai where she founded India’s first Research Centre for Women’s […]
Moment Magazine, where I am the senior editor, just launched the first in a multi-part series on Israel’s Arab citizens. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most covered conflicts in the world. But there is little media attention given to Israel’s one million Arab citizens, in spite of disturbing calls on the far Israeli […]
It is no secret that Mexico lags well behind European, North American and other Latin American countries in regards to women’s participation in government. Though Mexican women have been legally entitled to vote and stand for election since 1953, there is still a wide gap in terms of their equal representation in the three branches […]