special interests
Luke Harding on findings in the Panama Papers: There is no explanation in the files of why the banks agreed to extend such unorthodox credit lines. Some of the ...
Category: power
politics, history, force
You say Rachel, I say Really?
New software, same old problem:
Werk
A contrast in labor relations: Stud Terkel: Stills from Magic Mike.
“Se Vale Soñar” by Juan Cierro
My own hasty translation of the lyrics: I wish that when it rained instead of water, cocaine fell that beer would run along with tequila through the rivers and ...
Insecurity
Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato: Workers with less education are more likely to take jobs with more workplace stress, such as those involving shift work, experiencin...
Representation
“I feel a lot of hate,” she said. “I haven’t said anything bad to anyone.” says the 18 year-old attending a political rally in sup...
Hollywood
From West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein, excerpted by Andrew O’Hagan: I was very young in 1955, when Warner Brothers did Rebel without a Cause ...
Chronic Underemployment
Gabriel Thompson: Six years into the economic recovery, people continue to crisscross the state in search of gigs, putting in three hours of drive time for mayb...
Fair and Square
As quoted by Josh Marshall, a study of 51 recent elections finds that: In general elections, states with strict photo ID laws show a Latino turnout 10.3 points ...
South Pasadena, USA
I drove through South Pasadena, California this afternoon. It’s a beautiful neighborhood with tree lined streets and large, stately houses. If you’r...
robots and secrets
From an overview of consensus by John Cassidy: Why, then, are the markets so disturbed? One possible explanation has to do with trading algorithms, which encour...
looking at the dark side
George Soros: Recognizing a problem is an invitation to do something about it. That is the main lesson I learned from the formative experience of my life, in 19...
A movie about the “war on drugs”
At the end of the excellent movie Sicario, Benicio del Toro puts a gun to Emily Blunt’s face and tells her that she should move to a small town where the ...
competition
An intrepid researcher has mapped some of the microwave towers being used to conduct high-frequency-trading around the world. HFT requires competitors to use cu...
Portraits of War, Spanish edition
This observation is stolen entirely from Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Note the arrangement of the lances (weaponry) in this 1635 painting by Velázquez: versus this 201...
The campaigns
I was reading about the person who inspired the poem Ozymandias when I came upon the headline: “First Syrian Campaign.” Huh, I thought, so he also w...
Do we need a House of Lords?
Perhaps, this could be the future of the GOP: Yet though the role of the House of Lords was historically conservative and reactionary, and thus an easy target f...