Should a book on freegans—that is to say, people who try to live for “free” in the present through appropriating capitalism’s waste, while trying to build a future in which the things people need are provided for “free” through a gift economy—be free? This is a purely academic question. My “book” on freegans—I’m going to… Continue reading Free
It didn’t get much attention, but last week President Obama took the most drastic actions on climate change of his presidency. Leaving aside the really only marginal question of whether those policies will actually address climate change (see my friend Sasha’s post explaining why it won’t), the more interesting question for me is why he… Continue reading Climate Change is the New Falling Rate of Profit
One year ago, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti killed hundreds of thousands of people. A month later, a much larger quake in Chile killed only a fraction of that number. As far as I can tell, what made the difference between the two was not geography or geology. Instead, it was Haiti’s particularly harsh… Continue reading The Anti-Politics Machine
“I am so ___ about the mass killing in Tucson this Saturday that I think ____ ought to be _____.” The first blank is easy: I am mad. I am mad, in part, because it seems almost impossible not to be. And yet I’m also mad because, for all the talk of ‘taking it down… Continue reading Fill in the Blanks
I expected a lot of things when I woke up this morning and, thanks to the time difference, opened my New York Times to catch the electoral news. I anticipated seeing the GOP make massive gains, and I knew that, for all my “they’re-all-the-same” cynicism, I would feel totally despondent about it. They did,… Continue reading What left-leaning blogger isn’t writing one of these?
If laws on the books were all that mattered, I’d put Ecuador way ahead of the U.S. The new constitution gives a formal right to existence and protection to “nature”, and, somewhat more practically, offers civil unions to gay couples. Ecuador has nearly open-borders and strict gun control; almost the inverse of the U.S., where… Continue reading La Revolución Ciudadana Está En Marcha
Yesterday I interviewed Pablo Fajardo, and – while I knew it before I went in – the guy is a genuine hero. It’s easy to find information online about Pablo—I recommend this Vanity Fair article (really) or the movie Crude—so I will keep this introduction brief. Fajardo is the son of poor campesinos, born the… Continue reading Inspiration in the most likely of places
At the start of June, the New York Times published a piece by Jake Halpern called “The Freegan Establishment” on a group of radicals near-and-dear to my heart. While some might be less-than-enthusiastic about being the person that comes to mind when the issue of eating trash comes up, I was quite flatterd to have… Continue reading Not (Quite) Buying It
Here’s an exciting life update: I broke my wrist. I’m not going to go into how it happened, except to state that it did not involve alcohol and that my cover story is that it involved a fight with zombie ninja pirates. Not a huge deal, but definitely a frustrating and unneeded at a stressful… Continue reading Broken Bones and Open Borders
Listening to archaic hymns sung from the tower of one of Oxford’s most conservative colleges didn’t quite feel like the proper way to celebrate May Day. So, to reclaim some activist cred (and, in my own small way, to try to do right by the world), I spent my afternoon in Aylesbury – a town… Continue reading The Revolution Will Involve Mostly Retired People
Alex V. Barnard - Sociology 