What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?
Capitalism
Past Editor: Destin Jenkins
All Tomorrow’s Warnings
Both left and right employ “speculative nonfiction” to imagine the world after climate change. But who will win the battle of the futurists?
It’s the Geography, Stupid! Planetary Urbanization Revealed
Covid-19 spread so rapidly because urbanization is now planetary: connecting disparate territories through flows of goods and people.
Listen Closely: “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” @50
When the Trump presidency ends, and the toll of years of toxicity and mismanagement becomes clear, we are going to need some guidance.
A Tale of Two Valleys
To understand Silicon Valley, first examine the stories it tells about itself; just like, to understand the Victorian age, first read writers like Dickens and Dreiser.
Ideas Alone Won’t Tame Capital
Inequality emerged after the French Revolution, and again after the postwar boom, because our institutions have been hardwired to serve capital.
“Parasite” and the Plurality of Empire
Bong Joon-ho’s critique in Parasite is less of “universal” capitalism than of the particular imperialisms that have shaped Korean life.
How to Evolve Past Capitalism
Economic systems are like ecosystems. In America, capitalism may be the dominant species. But other species exist there, too.
The False Hopes of Homeownership
The American Dream of private home ownership has fueled a system that preys on Black people for profit.
Giving Credit to White Supremacy
Something, we are told, has changed in capitalism. Finance has replaced production as the main source of wealth; credit matters more than profit; even the ...
Economics: Theories vs. Stories
In the rubble of the Richard Nixon years, a University of Chicago economist named Arthur Laffer drew a diagram on a napkin to illustrate the hidden blessings of ...
Public Thinker: Frances Negrón-Muntaner on Puerto Rico, Art, and Decolonial Joy
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an innovative and multimodal thinker and artist, and a professor ...
Hong Kong: “When We Burn You Will Burn With Us”
The most telling chant of the 2019 Hong Kong protests is “Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times” (光復香港 時代革命), not because it offers a vision ...
Disrupting the “Startup Hustle”: An Interview with Margaret O’Mara
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Doerr, Jeff Bezos ...
Terminal Whiteness
While doing fieldwork in Tennessee for his eye-opening and often harrowing new book, Dying of Whiteness, Vanderbilt University Professor Jonathan M. Metzl met Trevor. A 40-something-year-old former ...
Goodbye to All That: The End of Neoliberalism?
For Richard Denniss, the evolution of the Australian War Memorial into a giant billboard illustrates the logic of neoliberalism, something that, he says ...
The World the Gulf Has Built
The viewing platform of the Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building in the world, provides an exceptional view. On a clear day, you can see Dubai’s towers ...
Can a Recipe Save Your Life?
A recipe can be more than a guide to making food. A recipe can be a mantra, a ritual, a symbolic stay against chaos in the psyche and in the world. A hybrid genre ...
Gig Authoritarians
In 2015, Stephen Colbert asked cofounder and then CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick how the company’s heavy investment in driverless car technology squared with its purported “commitment” to its “driver ...
On the Absurdity of Ethical Capitalism
I worked two “jobs” during my first summer as a graduate student in Indiana. One involved telemarketing research, convincing people to answer telephone ...