Given the origins of my blog’s name, I’ve avoided posting on Mondays. But I don’t get paid for doing this, and so this was a misbegotten impulse for the reasons I explain below. Yesterday I heard two interviews that helpfully recontextualize some common economic arguments about money and motivation, and provide another angle on the [...]

Hostess Brands, maker of the Twinkie, announced its liquidation today. This provoked a wave of now-more-than-everism, as both liberals and conservatives rushed to use the company’s failure as a testament to their longstanding hobbyhorses. To the Right, of course, the end of Hostess is just another great opportunity to bash unions. Although perhaps it’s a [...]

Drone assassination is now the first resort of the state. Inside the CIA’s new dystopian novel. “The Disposition Matrix” sounds like a dystopian science fiction novel. And indeed it is, but unfortunately it’s being written by the American counter-terrorism bureaucracy, and rolled out as the blueprint for a future of state-sanctioned death squads. The Washington [...]

A month or two ago, Bhaskar Sunkara came to me with the idea that we could, on a short deadline, turn our long-running discussions about the future of progressive politics in the United States into a “Piven-Cloward plan for the 21st century” for the cover of In These Times magazine. This was, of course, an [...]

In the debate between Alex Gourevitch on one side, and Chris Bertram and Jacobin contributing editor Max Ajl on the other, I’d put myself more on Bertram and Ajl’s side. Gourevitch’s essay was a bit too long on caricatures of environmentalism, and too short on critiques of the particular way in which development operates in [...]

Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about 3-D printers. Until recently, these devices have been seen either as novelties or as expensive pieces of equipment suited only for industrial use. Now, however, they are quickly becoming affordable to individuals, and capable of producing a wider range of practical items. Just as the computer became [...]

Update, 2 October 2012: Corrected a mistake in the data on the charitable contributions tax deduction. An earlier version referred to the wrong table from the Tax Policy Center. The American plutocracy’s habit of portraying itself as an oppressed minority has become a source of ongoing amusement, and Chrystia Freeland has the latest chapter of [...]