In policy circles today, the primacy of the capitalist state in efforts to confront climate change is a given. This is a premise worth questioning.
Capitalism
Past Editor: Destin Jenkins
“A Gun to Our Heads”
On October 13, 2016, Almir Suruí, then chief of the Paiter Suruí indigenous people of northwest Brazil, issued a panicked appeal. “This is my cry of alarm, please listen to me!” he wrote to national ...
Disaster Capitalism Strikes Puerto Rico
It has been a year since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving a trail of destruction: ruined infrastructure, destroyed homes, and thousands ...
Why the Lights Went Out in Puerto Rico
There is nothing like a prolonged blackout to drive home for American observers the unequal distribution of fortune. We know that no matter what kind of natural ...
How Prisons Serve Capitalism
I once asked a class at a prison in Washington State how they would describe the relationship between capitalism and incarceration. “They ...
Weeding Our Algorithmic Gardens
I’m usually not very worried about robots taking over the world. Skynet makes for entertaining science fiction, but the artificial intelligences we have now don’t ...
Striking Resemblances
Kadin Henningsen, a graduate student and teaching assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), went on strike this past February with 2,500 of his coworkers to protect their ...
Turning Kids into Capital
One of my pet peeves is when I hear a colleague refer to our students as “kids.” They’re not: they are younger than us, sure, but they are still adults who can go to war, operate giant metal boxes on ...
Sleep and Synchronicity
Two spectacularly haunting new works of fiction share a frightening and resonant premise: a world in which sleep is disappearing. Insomnia has a storied history, of course, as both ailment and plot ...
