Extremely Offline
This is the will of the people: On the long, sudden end of the Korean War.
Live from Seoul, correspondent Marc Flury reports on the 2018 Inter-Korean Summit between Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un - from the meeting's promising first steps towards peace and reconciliation between North and South Korea, to the long road leading to denuclearization and economic integration across the Korean peninsula.
For and against equality: Human rights in the neoliberal world.
Historian Samuel Moyn examines the failings of human rights in an era of austerity and inequality - as an unwitting partner to neoliberalism that actually advances inequality, and a poor substitute for the egalitarian project of twentieth-century welfare states to avoid the political consequences of a chasm between the rich and the rest.
Samuel is author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World from Harvard University Press.
The World Bank rankings are a weapon aimed at farmers in the Global South.
The Oakland Institute's Anuradha Mittal explains how the World Bank's coercive ranking systems harm farmers and democracies in the Global South by pushing governments to lower environmental and labor standards for the benefit of largescale commodity agriculture, and why a high level corruption case and resistance from farmers and civil society could overturn the entire project.
The Oakland Institute released the brief A Death Knell for the EBA? on their website.
What happens when #brands join the protest?
Journalist Julianne Tveten examines dissent's brand in a new age of commodified protest - from the ways corporations funnel the energy of social movements to safe consumption of the status quo, to the mostly toothless, apolitical performative resistance of liberals in the Trump-era. Also Facebook is still trash.
Julianne wrote the articles Living in a Pepsi Ad World for The New Republic and The Zuckerberg Hearings Were a Show Trial, And Facebook’s Monopoly Remains Unthreatened for In These Times.
Exploring the IRL peer-to-peer network of Cuba's offline internet.
Anthropologist Michaelanne Dye explores El Paquete Semanal - Cuba's informal, offline digital content compilation and distribution network, and explains how the interactions between downloaders, vendors and customers reveal a human component to the flow of information usually obscured by the online experience outside the country.
Michaelanne is co-author of the paper El Paquete Semanal: The Week's Internet in Havana, presented at the 2018 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Finally, a cure for anxiety! Not yours though. Sorry.
In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen recalls his early, panicked, bee-stung childhood, and discovers a very specific, Jeff Dorchen-shaped cause of his general anxiety - but also an extremely common cure, one that almost everyone has just lying around in their wallets and purses and bank accounts.
