Dire Education
How Chinese communism gave American conservatives something to believe in.
Historian Joyce Mao examines the long, shifting influence of China (as both threat and promise) on American conservatism - from McCarthyite Republicans looking for a political identity, to the muddled, ambigous ideas of today's GOP presidential candidates - and explains how it drew in blueprints for a conservative agenda of unilateral foreign policy and military expansion paid for by cuts to domestic spending.
Joyce is author of Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism from University of Chicago Press.
Neoliberal by degrees: The repackaging of an American college education.
Writer William Deresiewicz surveys the cost of a neoliberal university education - on student-consumers paying for security and conformity, on a culture dismantling the notions and mechanisms of a public good - and explains why the way out of the neoliberal education trap is the way out of neoliberalism itself - renewed egalitarianism and open access to society's wealth.
William is author of the September Harper's cover story The Neoliberal Arts: How college sold its soul to the market and the book Excellent Sheep.
Legal storytelling sketches human narratives into legal settings.
Lawpagandist Brian Foley explains his work with the Applied Legal Storytelling, a movement he co-created that brings techniques of narrative fiction into the courtroom, tells us what lawyers can learn from the second act of VH1's Behind the Music episodes, and why jurors (and humans in general) naturally prefer happy endings.
Brian wrote about the ALS movement in the article Applied Legal Storytelling, Politics and Factual Realism for the Journal of the Legal Writing Institute.
The Fight For Dyett is the struggle for schools serving children and communities, not corporations.
Writer and former public school teacher Eve Ewing explains why the Bronzeville community's fight to save open-enrollment Dyett High School is about more than just saving one school - it's about fighting against government doublespeak, corporate control and racist attitudes around black neighborhoods and families, and fighting for high quality education as a public good, an economic equalizer and a human right.
Eve wrote the letter Phantoms Playing Double-Dutch: Why the Fight for Dyett is Bigger than One Chicago School Closing at Seven Scribes.
Gay rights are a revolutionary goal, in Cuba and beyond.
Activist Alberto Roque Guerra joins Chuck in studio to talk about a generation of LGBT rights progress in Cuba, how equality and anti-discrimination fit into a revolutionary socialist framework, and working towards a radical future beyond measuring humans by gender identity.
Alberto will be speaking in Chicago at the LGBTs in Cuba event on September 1st, sponsored by Gay Liberation Network and Chicago ALBA Solidarity Committee.
Poking the dog turd of nationalist paranoia.
Jeff Dorchen attends a white supremacist Donald Trump rally with Richard Hofstadter, internet extremists, identity politicians, bug-eyed shriekers, invisible Hitlers, multiplying Indian muslims, gullible morons, Joseph Heller, Vedic traditions, paranoid stylists, Lao Tzu, a stick, and a pile of turds.
