“The protests demanding that states “reopen” after all are protests demanding that working people head back into jobs that risk their health. The now-infamous “I Want a Haircut!” sign brandished by a Wisconsin woman underlined the point: These people aren’t simply protesting curtailments of their own movement. They are protesting a lack of people to serve them. They are demanding other people get back to work. And when we look at that sign and flinch […]
Author: Bobbie Johnson
“Why is it that the losers of the story always have to carry their loss on their backs when they didn’t choose it?” Louis often says. “Other people are responsible for the suffering of others.” Edouard Louis in ‘I Always Write With a Sense of Shame’, New York Times Magazine
911 dispatchers are at the forefront of a head-exploding amount of stress: the definition of their job is to talk to people at the very worst moment of their life. What’s it like on the front lines? (Katie MacBride, Vice)
How Wall Street bought up $60bn of foreclosed homes and turned them into rentals—in some cases renting them back to their desperate former owners with extortionate add-ons. (Francesca Mari, New York Times Magazine)
BRB24: How to handle an apocalypse
It’s not panic, exactly. It’s almost–panic, a tremor of a fear that is beginning to surge but is not yet quite established. It’s hearing an echo, a whisper in a nervous crowd. One person coughs on the train, everyone stares. Reactions shaped by a lifetime of narratives about the End—the disaster that changes everything, the disease that triggers a cataclysm. We know how this story goes, right? A few weeks ago, before this became this, […]
Should we stop political journalists covering coronavirus? (Dan Froomkin, Presswatch)
Malcolm Harris on fossil fuel’s plan to profit from climate change
“Last fall, the Shell Scenarios team — as in Royal Dutch Shell, one of the biggest oil companies in the world — offered me £2,000 in exchange for a 15-minute talk and my participation in a group exercise. Its internal corporate think tank was holding a daylong conference about how generational change would affect the hopefulness projected in what the company calls the “Sky Scenario,” which it describes as “a technically possible but challenging pathway […]
BRB23: You always know, even when you don’t
The thing about being poor is that you never quite realize it until something happens—a moment of shame that puts you in your place, or an embarrassment that flushes your truth out for everyone to see. The thing about being really poor, though, is that you realize it all the time. We veered between different points along the spectrum, traveling one way and another driven by the ups and downs of an economy nobody really […]
Life inside the book-to-film complex
Very interested to read this James Pogue takedown of the explosion in non-fiction which is made to be sold to Hollywood (or whatever we call the Netflix-Apple-Hulu-Amazon-Hollywood machine these days.) While it’s somewhat flawed, possibly unfair to a number of authors, and more than a little self-serving, the essay does do a good job laying out an argument about a very specific kind of journalistic product. “The book-to-film complex is bolstered by two imperatives that […]
Out of copyright
This has just come to my attention from last year: 1923, a project by Parker Higgins to create magazines from material that was entering the public domain. There were several hundred genuine print subscriptions available through the project’s Kickstarter (long gone) but downloadable online. I hope he made it to the end of the year—the archive stops in October.
Start here 