Lender's Game
The pushout: How racism and sexism collide to criminalize Black girls.
Social justice scholar Monique Morris explores the ways implicit biases in our society - around class, sex and race - combine to push Black girls out of schools and towards the criminal legal system, and explains why educational institutions must re-examine their misunderstandings around the thoughts and actions of Black girls, and their reliance on an exclusionary discipline framework that amplifies the mistreatment of an already vulnerable group of children.
Monique is author of Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools from The New Press.
Surviving by default: A report from underwater Puerto Rico.
Our Man in San Juan, Dave Buchen adds a botched musical intro to the list of things he's surviving in Puerto Rico these days - a slow motion debt crisis unfolding across the island, an inevitable flattening of the first and third worlds, no soap in the school bathrooms, Zika virus - and explains why the emptying island just has more room for underground economies, local markets, crybaby baseball players, and Dave's latest book.
Oh yeah, that book, and the entire series, can be found here: Enciclopedia Deiknumena.
I thought I was living in a democracy: Dilma Rousseff, on trial.
Live from São Paulo, Brian Mier reports on the impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff - a trial without an actual impeachable offense, but with plenty of corrupt, evangelical, privatization-worshiping elites in the opposition, and explains why US intervention in the politics of Brazil (and Latin America) is just as destabilizing (and profitable) as ever.
Brian recommends reading the Intercept article After Vote to Remove Brazil’s President, Key Opposition Figure Holds Meetings in Washington.
How resentment became the driving force behind our fractured politics.
Political scientist Kathy Cramer traces the bitterly fractured state of modern American politics to a Reagan-era division over the nature of government itself, and explains how growing economic inequality, widespread distrust of institutions and place-based identities have turned political disagreements into personal conflicts, turning blame away from decision makers, and towards fellow Americans.
Kathy wrote the new book The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.
Greece is an inconvenience: Varoufakis on Europe's debt charade.
Economist and former Finance Minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis challenges the bankrupt ideology of Europe's debt/austerity regime - from the unbearable price of Eurozone-imposed "order," to the cynical morality play of bank-bound bailouts - and warns that the EU's current financial crisis is setting the stage for a much larger (and historically familiar) conflict across the continent - and beyond.
Yanis is author of And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future from PublicAffairs.
A human violin plays the hits, from murder to food poisoning.
Visual artist, songwriter/musician, actor, essayist, poet, playwright and screenwriter Jeff Dorchen adds "violin" to his CV, meets an inspiring West Bank odd couple, resists the Facebook-sympathy-profile-pic complex, opens his mind, empties his bowels, and joins the Middle Age poet Judah Halevi in fashioning an instrument of himself, capable of playing back all the songs you want to hear. And don't.
