The Most Important Modern Farmer Might Be The Urban Cowboy
It’s a modern paradox. In a city like New York, where everything is available 24 hours a day, some neighborhoods don’t even have access to the most basic fresh foods at…
Is Puebla like Bogotá? The geography of drug trafficking in Mexico
Puebla, Mexico. Flickr. Some rights reserved. In 2010, the most violent year in Felipe Calderón’s “war on drugs” (2006-2012), the intelligence consultancy firm Stratfor produced an infographic detailing the geography…
What It’s Really Like To Live With Schizophrenia
I am one of the 51 million people worldwide living with schizophrenia, diagnosed five years ago when I was 25 years old. Since then, I’ve been wrestling not only with…
Why we should oppose British air strikes against ISIL in Syria
Funeral in Kobane, November 6, 2015. Demotix/ Soran Qurbani. All rights reserved.The threat of ISIL is too serious to be treated with a knee jerk response like air strikes as…
Comedian Dave Chappelle Attends Town Hall To Offer Sincere Thoughts On Police Violence
With the country fractured along political lines and with some elected representatives continuing to make themselves unavailable, people are looking to local town halls to address issues. One such civic assembly took…
Memetic engineering: conspiracies, viruses and historical agency
A human white blood cell (CD4) being attacked by the HIV virus; an AIDS prevention advertisement by The Ministry of Education Training, Vietnam. Colour lithograph, ca. 1995. Wikicommons/Wellcome images. Some…
Indiana University Will No Longer Accept Student-Athletes With Histories Of Sexual Assault Or Domestic Violence
Following countless campus scandals, college administrators are taking pains to ensure that incidents of sexual assault by student-athletes don’t mar the reputation of the school. A new policy at Indiana University seeks to…
What’s DiEM25, really? Reply to an open letter by Souvlis & Mazzolini
DiEM25 in Rome. Screenshot Talk Real.Shortly after DiEM25’s Rome launch, I received a splendid Open Letter from George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini. It reminded me of another such letter I…
Let’s Treat Intolerance Like A Disease
Hitler, despite suffering from chronic flatulence, was a vegetarian and in pretty good health at the time he orchestrated the slaughter of millions of innocent people. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu…
Anti-Muslim hatred from the margins to the mainstream
The Ottoman army besieging Vienna (1529), Hüner-nāme, Topkapi-Serail-Museum, Hazine . Wikicommons/ Nakkaş Osman. Some rights reserved.2015 was the year that anti-Muslim sentiment officially moved from the margins to the mainstream…