Flesh Drive
Liberalism and the left in the New Atheists' blindspot.
Writer Jacob Hamburger traces New Atheism's shifting relationship with liberal ideology - from the movement's origins in opposition to perceived Bush-era religious irrationality, to today's centrist reactions against campus politics and the emerging socialist left that often contradict the core liberal values the New Atheists claim to uphold.
Jacob wrote the article What Was New Atheism? for The Point.
Hamilton, la junta and other colonial tragedies in Puerto Rico.
Our Man in San Juan, Dave Buchen reports on normal life in post-Mario, mid-austerity Puerto Rico - under the weight of a generational debt to Wall Street while playing host to an ironically nonconflicted musical about overthrowing colonialism, and explains why Puerto Ricans don't need statehood from the US, they need independence from it.
Listen to Dave's other reports from Puerto Rico here. Oh and his 2019 calendar is here and very good.
Yellow Vests still on: Why the Gilets Jaunes are getting the goods.
Live from Paris, journalist Cole Stangler explains how France's Yellow Vest movement is using working-class anger over its economic precarity, and the deep unpopularity of the entire French political establishment to win concessions from a deeply unpopular president - and why success isn't slowing the Gilets Jaunes's momentum.
Cole wrote the article Back on the Offensive for Jacobin.
White power on a dead planet: Against the myths of purity and progress.
Writer Ben Ehrenreich explains how Enlightenment-era ideas of progress and Western civilization collapsed time and space around the bumbling, destructive European ideology of early capitalism, and why those ideas still mis-guide the bumbling, destructive European ideology of late capitalism on a dying planet.
Ben wrote the article After the Storm for The Baffler.
Machine yearning: On the future of human sex with robots.
Computer scientist Kate Devlin explores the human questions raised by sex with robots - as an industry on the bleeding edge of AI and robotics tech, and an endeavor that will challenge and redefine society's values around pleasure, intimacy, and ultimately, our relationship with machines.
Kate is author of the book Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots from Bloomsbury.
Even farmers gotta eat.
In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen thinks a lot about farming and farmers and food, and the necessity of all those things, and the precarity of the second of those things, and the fake scarcity of the third of those things, and what kind of dumb world makes it hard to make a living literally making life for other lives to keep living.
