Spin Cycle
What happens when Donald Trump's improv act takes the highest stage?
Writer Mark Danner looks beyond Donald Trump's bizarre / revolutionary song and dance campaign act and into his future as a political actor, and explains how Trump's populist infrastructure and entitlement promises will be tested early by a Republican congress.
Mark wrote the piece The Real Trump for New York Review of Books.
Rage for order: The pathological roots of America's 80 year drug war.
Writer Alexandra Chasin explores the enduring blueprints of drug war architect Harry J. Anslinger, a Prohibition-era bureaucrat who built the racist and classist mechanisms for social control into the earliest iterations of America's narcotic enforcement policies, creating a self-failing system and laying the groundwork for modern mass incarceration.
Alexandra is author of Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger's War on Drugs from University of Chicago Press.
Violence, nationalism and coup after coup in Brazil.
Live from São Paulo, Brian Mier reports on the swell of bigotry and racism in Brazil after the country's right-wing successfully removed the elected center-left government, and reflects on the indirect (for now) evidence that the US expanded state worked to destabilize the country ahead of 2016's soft coup.
Brian wrote The US & Brasil's Coup of 2016, and translated Luciana Itikawa's piece The Golpista Everyman & the “Clean” City for Brasil Wire.
The price of rent and risk in San Francisco's drag scene.
Journalist Julianne Tveten examines the dynamics between San Francisco's subversive drag scene and the city's new tech overlords, and explains how rising rents and the dominance of corporate culture threatens to strip the city of an economic class, as well a vital source for art, critique and the opposite of more computer people.
Julianne wrote the recent articles Just Enough Money to Pay For Our Eyelashes: The New San Francisco Drag for Hazlitt and Digital Redlining: How Internet Service Providers Promote Poverty for Truthout.
How mainstream journalists created fake news from a Julian Assange interview.
Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi explains how her recent interview with Julian Assange was distorted by the Guardian, Washington Post and across social media to manufacture a pro-Trump agenda from the Wikileaks founder, and reflects on the political realities faced by Assange under detention and his organization under attack by the establishment press.
Stefania's interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was distorted by the Guardian's Ben Jacobs, as covered by Glenn Greenwald for the Intercept.
The man's guide to capitalism: A capitalist's guide to men.
In a high T Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen examines the interactions between masculinity and capitalism, between the Hero and the Gaze, the shell and the jewel, emasculation and fascism, the organism and the environment - all sorts of binaries you'd have a problem with if you weren't such a powerful man right now.
