Reading Time: 3 minutes In a series of moves surprising no one, the Taliban government in Afghanistan this past week banned women from universities, and also locked girls out of primary school (essentially ending education to female persons across the board), before also banning women from work in any local non-government organizations (NGOs). The usual nonsense reasons pertaining to […]
poverty
Posted inEconomics
Low-income workers get a little raise! Big whoop.
Reading Time: 4 minutes We’re all, at least to some degree, deluded. Whether we believe fervently in deities that—let’s be honest—seem not to exist anywhere. Whether we believe someone we love deeply loves us back when they actually don’t. Or whether we believe we understand what being poor really means. The problem is, we often blithely believe we aren’t […]
Posted inHuman Story
Inflation isn’t what’s making Americans unhappy
Reading Time: 4 minutes “It’s the economy, stupid.” It was a memorable 1992 quip that quickly went viral—and it’s still popular today—after being uttered by then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s political guru, James Carville, the “ragin’ Cajun.” Turns out, that theory may not necessarily be quite right, though. Carville was saying that the state of the economy, more than any […]
Posted inClimate Crisis
Pakistan flooding isn’t just a natural calamity: It’s also our failure to adapt
Reading Time: 2 minutes This weekend, Pakistan flooding caused skyrocketing death and displacement tolls, where rains 190 percent higher than a 30-year average have yielded catastrophic flooding, and a national emergency in need of immediate international redress. To date, over 1,000 people have been killed, including hundreds of children, since flooding began in mid-June. On Sunday, the National Disaster […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘My Mister’: Kind of a love story about something else
Reading Time: 4 minutes Long before I experienced the beguilingly and sometimes joltingly offbeat South Korean drama Parasite, which so deservedly won the Academy Award for best picture in 2020—the first-ever Korean winner—I’ve been a huge fan of that country’s ever-enthralling movies and TV series. Thank goodness for mega-streamer Netflix, which stocks a massive archive of new and older […]
Posted inCulture
Does anyone have to be poor?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Does anyone have to be poor? Or is the ongoing existence of poverty a choice we make? In 2021, the world’s population was 7.9 billion people. Over the same time period, the gross world product (GWP)—the sum total of all human economic activity—was around $87 trillion. This figure encompasses vast inequality, everyone from yacht-owning billionaires […]
Posted inCulture
Yahoo boys, money rituals, and the magic of desperation
Reading Time: 6 minutes Yahoo boys, babalawos, money rituals. If these terms don’t already mean anything to you, brace yourself—we’re venturing into hard territory. Nigeria is a West African country with two-thirds of the US population packed into less than a tenth of the territory. And there, in recent months, a perennial cycle of violent rituals thought to bring […]
Posted inPolitics
On Defending Billionaires
Reading Time: 7 minutes In the recent UK general election and in previous and present US political discourse, there has been a propensity to defend billionaires by those who aren’t billionaires. In fact, those who defend them are far, far closer to poverty and bankruptcy than to being a billionaire. By a considerable margin. The defence of billionaires seems […]
Posted inCulture, General, Sex & Gender
Opposing Veterans’ Rights & LGBTQ+ Rights Is Dumb
Reading Time: 5 minutes In a rare rant-style post, I take down the already-dubious logic of some silly thing I saw on the internet…because letting these statements stand is harmful, for so many reasons.
Posted inGeneral
‘Socialism’ is just another word for ‘nothing left to lose’
Reading Time: 4 minutes Socialism is an ascendant meme currently in the U.S., but what it means seems as varied as the people who voice it. But defining it is critical in reducing inequality.