Anti Up
When a post-industrial city bets big on casino gambling.
American studies scholar Chloe Taft examines the transformation of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania from post-industrial decline to casino profit-fuelled stability, and finds another city in America struggling to balance the rewards of short term stability with the risks of increased corporate influence on civic planning and local government.
Chloe is the author of From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City from Harvard University Press.
Black futures are built on the fight for economic and racial justice.
Black Youth Project 100's Janae Bonsu explains why Black liberation is not possible without attaining both racial justice and economic justice, and how the movement requires including all Black voices in the struggle to dismantle a centuries-old system of laws and actions that draw power and profit from the oppression of people of color.
Janaé is one of the authors of the BYP100 report Agenda to Build Black Futures.
Invisible in a number of ways: Spring break with Miami's hotel housekeepers.
Journalist Michelle Chen reports on the labor conditions of Miami's hotel housekeepers - from the increasing demands of management-imposed piecework, to the necessity of enduring physical and sexual harassment from hotel guests - and explains why the built-in economic precarity of hotel workers is being worsened by managment's use of guest workers to skirt domestic labor laws, and our own blindness to the conditions of our fellow workers.
Michelle wrote the article Spring Break’s Cleanup Crew for Slate.
Surrounded on all sides, the Syrian revolution continues.
Authors Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab explore the political and social landscape of revolutionary Syria - from the Assad regime's suicide pact with the prospect of economic reform, to the enduring goals of Syrian civil society in the crossfire between the state and the jihadists it sustains - and explains why foreign intervention in the conlict has empowered the conflict itself, not the prospects for freedom and democracy that drive the Syrian revolutionaries.
Robin and Leila are authors of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War from Pluto Press.
See Robin and Leila speaking in-person this month across the US
The corporate consolidation of craft beer hits the bar scene.
The Hopleaf's Michael Roper explains how the market forces consolidating craft breweries and supermarket shelves around the country have moved to franchising bars - meaning more clout for chains and less access for local businesses - and why the growing influence of banks and finance on the industry might be worse for beer than even Miller or Bud.
On Sunday May 1st, 100% of the Hopleaf's profits will be donated to the local Helen C. Peirce school - so stop by to put your drinking to good use for once.
Je Suis Snuffy Smith: On the thinkpiecing of White poverty.
Jeff Dorchen reads a dumb thing on the internet (the Moment of Truth's version of 'Once Upon a Time...') and considers the limitations of Twitter-based political hot takery, the smugness of "Slate's chief political correspondent," and the infuriatingly limited discourse around White poverty (and the infuriatingly limited discourse around that discourse,) and suggests that just maybe if we can find the one thing that poor whites and poor non-whites have in common, we can rise up, from Juggalo to Beyhive, and kill the oligarchy.
