Tag
Labor
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The Life of the Mind of a Factory Worker
“Beware to those who read ‘Adrift in the South’ solely as a cautionary tale about the Chinese state without considering the international flows of goods and power.”
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“There Is a Scottsboro in Every Country”
When we speak about a future in which all black people in America can be free, it’s hard to picture how, exactly, that freedom might look. Many black communists …
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Tabloid War, Class War
Respectability is overrated. Or so said Gawker, the influential, controversial, and luridly entertaining news and gossip site that was forced to close in 2016. Covering stories that other media outlets wouldn’t touch, Gawker made the powerful squirm, anticipated #MeToo, and started an extraordinary wave of labor organizing in digital media, all while embracing a critical,…
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Policing Backpage and the Backpages
We tend to think of the 21st century and its digitally-mediated, commodified, sexualized reality as a brave new world, but we’ve been here before …
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Martin Luther King Jr. and Workers’ Rights in Baltimore
In 1968, municipal sanitation workers angered by poor wages and dangerous working conditions . . .
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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 jobs and (no pressure) the future possibility of liberal arts education. In the process, Henningsen may have discovered the perfect role model for the millions…
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The Big Picture: Violence and Free Speech
On August 11 and 12, white nationalists came to march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live and work. The rally exposed many things, among them some of the challenges that Trumpism poses for freedom of speech today. Trump and his administration have raised a number of concerns in this arena: from threatening to muzzle the…
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The Big Picture: The Devastated House of Labor
American workers are heterogeneous politically, as well as racially, ethnically, and educationally. Unions are equally mixed. Some unions focus primarily on the narrow economic interests of their members, and others have strong commitments to social justice. Despite their differences, virtually all unions and their confederations in the post-WWII era increasingly advocated racial inclusiveness and greater…
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Is Our Work Done?
The answer depends, of course, on our definition of work. I’m writing this late at night. It’s Sunday and I’ve cooked some soup, marked some exams. I hardly know what counts as work these days. The paid stuff doesn’t always seem like the most important, although sometimes it feels easiest. I lurch into holidays dreading…
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The University and the Station: A Brontë Bicentenary in Taiwan
It takes a circuitous taxi ride winding up Lianhai Road to reach Taiwan’s …
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Virtual Roundtable on
“Description in the Novel”This roundtable on description in the novel took place on May 3, 2016, at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Concluding the inaugural year of the Novel Theory Seminar, the roundtable featured presentations by Wai Chee Dimock, Heather Love, William Mills Todd III, J. Keith Vincent, and Cynthia Wall. To solicit brief position papers…
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Workplace Romances
Do what you love. Most American 20- or 30-somethings have heard this helpful tidbit of career counseling at one time or another in the course of our lives. Like many adages, this one is dangerous: it places a burden on young people to invest emotionally in what is, for many, a matter of survival. Consequences…
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Who Builds Anything In This Country?
Colson Whitehead, you may have heard, has written a new novel. In The Underground Railroad, he has created a sympathetic protagonist, Cora, through whom readers can experience the surreal depredations of 19th-century …
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Commuter Lit: How to Do an MFA on the MTA
When I moved to New York three years ago, to start graduate school at Columbia University, I took pains to rationalize my decision to live in Brooklyn—rather than, say, Morningside Heights or Washington Heights or Harlem or, really, anywhere in the relative vicinity of campus. I would be studying in the nonfiction MFA program and…
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On Accelerationism
At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom.
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Tell Us How We Did
In 1928, Eric Blair, an unemployed, itinerant writer and former British colonial policeman, went to work as a dishwasher in a Paris hotel. Five years later, under the pen name George Orwell, Blair would assemble his reflections on the lives of Parisian service laborers into the first part of a gritty satirical memoir called, Down…
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Gamifying the Workplace
Anyone who has read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer no doubt remembers the fence-painting scene. Consigned as a punishment by his Aunt Polly to spend a Saturday whitewashing 30 yards of wooden fence, Tom instead recruits neighborhood boys to do the chore for him. He convinces his marks that fence painting—far from being drudgery—is an…
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Sex and Socialism
Three recent books tell the stories of four women whose lives both absorbed and propelled the vast, multifaceted socialist movement in Britain from 1870 to 1920: Lizzie Burns, Nellie Dowell, Muriel Lester, and Eleanor Marx. While all of them played roles in the struggle for equality of class, wealth, and opportunity, and all of their…
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Making Labor Visible: An Interview with Ramiro Gomez
The work of Ramiro Gomez draws attention to the domestic workers and day laborers upon whose ministrations luxury lifestyles depend …
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From Bartleby to Scrivener for iOS
From the earliest typewriters to Google Docs, writing devices have never been built for novelists. Instead, they are designed for office use, with creative writing of all sorts seen as a marginal-at-best side market. Determining what difference these repurposed office technologies make to writing is difficult, though, since no simple hypothesis about the effects of…
