Torture Logic
How torture became normal.
Security analyst Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault explains how US politicians and lawyers advanced the policies of torture in the years after 9/11 - as an ideological rejection of international law, and an advancement of executive authority - turning torture into an issue for partisans to debate in the media, and a spectacle for citizens to consume in popular culture.
Elizabeth is author of How the Gloves Came Off: Lawyers, Policy Makers, and Norms in the Debate on Torture from Columbia University Press.
Towards an empowerment beyond employment in the garment industry.
Development researcher Rebecca Reeve examines the exploitation women workers in the global garment industry - as informal workers without legal protection or labor rights, and the site of production and exploitation at the bottom of the global value chain - and calls for NGOs and consumers to recognize that empowerment exists beyond income or participation in capitalism.
Rebecca wrote the article PR, profit and ‘empowering women’ in the garment industry for openDemocracy.
Are we more comfortable apart? On the everyday roots of American extremism.
Journalist Michelle Chen examines the explosion (sadly not literally) of hate groups in the US - as a reaction to the Obama and Trump presidencies, and an indicator of larger trends of social isolation and economic failure across American society - and discusses the media's role in normalizing, and amplifying, the alt right white supremacist agenda.
Michelle wrote the article Donald Trump’s Rise Has Coincided With an Explosion of Hate Groups for The Nation.
Feminism's promise is not a place within capitalism - it's a place beyond it.
Writer Jessa Crispin rejects today's mainstreamed, neoliberal feminism, and calls for a return to feminism's radical promise: as a sharp-edged, outsider's social critique, as a challenge to the supremacy of capitalism, and as a path towards a radically reorganized society.
Jessa wrote the book Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto from Melville House.
What do driverless vehicles mean for workless drivers?
Political scientist Mara Rockeymoore surveys the impact of autonomous vehicles on the driving profession, and automation on American labor as a whole - and calls for policies that protect workers threatened by precarity, and ensure the benefits of automation are spread across society, and not just redirected into the hands of the wealthy.
Maya is co-author of the report Stick Shift: Autonomous Vehicles, Driving Jobs, and the Future of Work from the Center for Global Policy Solutions.
Trump l'oeil: Some views on liberty, from a bar in Paris.
Dans un moment de vérité, Jeff Dorchen reports live from Paris, on the city's Rabelaisian origin story, the possibility of the French right taking power, the problem with talking about whether France has a problem, and change, and laughter, and the structural integrity of a wall made of interlocking male and female sex parts.
