The city’s ports may be physically located in the imperial core—inside the barricades of the USA—but their tendrils span the globe.
Capitalism
Past Editor: Destin Jenkins
The Frankfurt Book Fair and Its Cupboards
“In order to understand the multi-dimensionality of the global book industry, we urgently need to move beyond standard methods alone.”
Five Books on Labor and Ecology
Our scorching planetary age results from the conjoined forces of colonial extractivism, fossil capitalism, and postcolonial developmentalism.
5 Books on the Politics of Indonesian Labor
People are familiar with how big the Japanese and South Korean economies are, but Indonesia is a rising power in Asia with a large labor force, and it’s very rarely being talked about.
“Let Us Gather Together”
Capital violently forces dispossessed people into markets, workplaces, and prisons. But such forced meetings could end capitalism itself.
Car Creditocracy: An Interview with Julie Livingston & Andrew Ross
“If you are a car owner, you are red meat for whoever wants to prey upon you, whether it is police, auto lenders, or state agencies.”
“Work More, Consume Less”: How Austerity Coerces
The true purpose of austerity is to permanently and structurally extract resources from the many to the few.
How to Profit from Climate Change
How did capitalism waste the crucial decades when climate change could have been halted? By fixating on—and downplaying—“risk.”
Taking Our Time: How Australian Universities Measure Academic Work
“Who gets to decide what is valuable and necessary work for an academic today?”
“Democracy Depends on It”: Carissa Véliz on Privacy and Ending Data Surveillance
“There is nothing shocking or radical about ending an economic practice that has too many negative externalities.”
America’s “Land Grab” Universities: Robert Lee on Colonial Extraction by “Treaty-Like Agreements”
“It’s not about the land underneath campuses. It’s land at a distance, that can be sold or managed to raise funds for endowments.”
Marshall Sahlins’s “Original Affluent Society” 50 Years Later
Capitalism seeks wealth to meet desires. But foraging societies follow “the Zen road to affluence”: not by getting more, but wanting less.
Private Pain, Public Disinvestment: Talking Student Debt with Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
“Individual Americans thought they were the only ones who could not afford to send their kids to college.”
Why Renters Fought NYC’s Push for Ownership
“Doesn’t every New Yorker really want to own a co-op?,” a realtor asked a crowd of tenants in 1972. But this provoked only “a chorus of noes.”
Public Thinker: Sophie Gonick on Housing Justice and Mass Movements
“As often the most vulnerable in our cities, immigrants face struggles that reflect the wider landscape of housing precarity.”
Is “Regulation from Below” Possible?
A powerful grassroots movement campaigned in the ’70s and ’80s for banks to reinvest equitably in red-lined urban communities. It failed—but why?
Public Thinker: Destin Jenkins on Breaking Bonds
“What if we identified the politics of municipal debt as circumscribing political horizons and futures?”
How to See Silicon Valley: Talking with Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner
"The ways in which the community itself is breaking down felt like end game capitalism."
The Long Road to a New Ideology: Piketty on Trump, Democrats, and Inequality
“We need to have both the reparation and the universal perspective on economic justice.”
Hope and Capital: Talking India with Ravinder Kaur
“Anyone who comes in the way of the ‘good times’ becomes a threat to capital, and to the nation-state itself.”