Colvin died trying to retrieve her shoes so she could escape a rocket shelling attack (the custom in Syria is to leave one's shoes at the door before entering a home; the rocket landed a few yards away from her as she was preparing to escape). — Read the rest
A wonderful friend began sending me Bob Eckstein's watercolor postcards of famous, still existing, and no longer existing, brick-and-mortar bookstores from across the globe when I was laid up for a few months from an injury last year. Each postcard includes the year the store was opened. — Read the rest
Do you know who owns your debt? Do you know who makes money off your hustle to pay off the principal, compounding interest and fees, and that strange moral obligation to repay the debt? Is it an investment firm, a rural bank, a person, a government, a church, or a non-profit? — Read the rest
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is campaigning with Bernie Sanders in Iowa, generally considered a conservative, red-state kind of place — so much so that Iowa GOP operators made a series of public predictions that she would be laughed out of the state. The state party chairman Jeff Kaufmann called her "Doctor Ocasio-Cortez" and Sanders "Crazy Bernie": "She's got a problem with our cows here!" — Read the rest
The latest turn in the Gamergate sage: Zoe Quinn (previously) outed their former partner, game dev Alec Holowka as a sexual and emotional abuser, which prompted others to come forward with their own stories of abuse at Holowka's hands, which led to Holowka being kicked out of his Night in the Woods game project — and shortly thereafter, Holowka committed suicide.
A 58 year old woman who worked as a sex worker and has been identified as someone who performed services for Robert Kraft has been arrested, and is currently in jail.
I was lucky enough to be invited to submit a piece to Ian Bogost's Atlantic series on the future of cities (previously: James Bridle, Bruce Sterling, Molly Sauter, Adam Greenfield); I told Ian I wanted to build on my 2017 Locus column about using networks to allow us to coordinate our work and play in a way that maximized our freedom, so that we could work outdoors on nice days, or commute when the traffic was light, or just throw an impromptu block party when the neighborhood needed a break.
Disaster capitalism depends on the idea that "There is No Alternative" and that the populace can only sit by passively while their infrastructure, government, homes and schools are hijacked and sold off to low-bidder corporations to financially engineer and then extract rent from.
The American Civil Liberties Union has released a brief overview of the transgender rights movement, focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, beautifully illustrated by Molly Crabapple.
Before Laurie Penny was a brilliant young feminist novelist, she was a brilliant young essayist, blazing through the British (and then the world's) media with column after column that skewered social ills on what Warren Ellis aptly dubbed her "red pen of justice."
The latest poll emailed by Trump HQ to its mailing lists asks supporters to click based on whether they "stand with President Trump" or "believe Democrats and Fake News": click the former and you're taken to a donation solicitation, click the latter and you are taken to a page where you're informed that "Democrats, the media, and the entire opposition have tried to take down President Trump by attacking him, spreading fake news and fake polls, and spreading fake news."
Ever since I read Laurie Penny's scathing, insider account of Milo Yiannopoulos and his schtick, I knew that she had his number like no one else — and now that Yiannopoulos has been disbarred from his position as the useful idiot of the hard-right, I've been wondering what Penny made of the fall from grace.
The Defense Department is expected to propose that the United States send ground combat forces into northern Syria for the first time, expand the assault on ISIS, CNN's Barbara Starr reports. — Read the rest
Laurie Penny, "a radical queer feminist leftist writer burdened with actual principles," has a weird frenemy relationship with trolling, racist, alt-right opportunist Milo Yiannopoulos, who was just permanently banned from Twitter for orchestrating a racist harassment campaign against Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones.
In 2006, western leaders decided that Gaddafi's oil was more important than his human rights record and complicity in terrorism and lifted sanctions against Libya, creating a massive pool of cash for the country that it turned into a sovereign wealth fund whose business was aggressively courted by Goldman Sachs.
Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo — a former venture capitalist who invested state funds with hedge funds during her tenure as state treasurer — invited Goldman Sachs to set up a partnership with the Community College of Rhode Island, then kicked out the college's daycare center to make room for Goldman staffers to work.
No one at Goldman Sachs will go to jail despite the company's world-destroying, multi-billion-dollar frauds that culminated in its unloading billions' worth of worthless mortgage-backed securities on its customers just before the crash.
