Capitalism
Since the 1980s, fossil fuel firms have run ads touting climate denial messages – many of which they’d now like us to forget. Here’s our visual guide. Why is meaningful action to avert the climate crisis proving so difficult? It is, at least in part, because of ads. The fossil fuel industry has perpetrated a
Capitalism
The nation’s original failure to “build back better” was Reconstruction, the attempt to radically remake society in the wake of the Civil War. Then as now, the most powerful people in the country went out of their way to maintain the status quo. America loves a good comeback story, but only at the movies. In
Capitalism
Buildings’ design communicates the values of a society. In contemporary American architecture, those values appear closer to control and surveillance than openness and enjoyment for all. Public buildings — all buildings — perform social functions; they organize people and their activities. Prisons remove people from their environment and therefore their humanity; they discipline and isolate.
Capitalism
The South of slavery and Jim Crow is often cast as the major historical reason for the US’s stunted welfare state. But the most fanatical resistance to taxation and redistribution came from the Northern ruling class. To understand our current politics of austerity, we are better served to explore not the defeated ideology of slaveholders
Art
From brands commissioning immersive installations at prestigious art fairs to hedge funds transforming artworks into stock-like financial instruments, the line between art and capital is blurrier than ever. Capitalism, of course, has always been in the process of absorbing art. For the most part, art has historically functioned as a site of patronage, an asset
Capitalism
Corporate giants are raising prices even as they rake in record profits. How can this be? Because of their unchecked power. There’s a deeper structural reason for inflation, one that appears to be growing worse: the economic concentration of the American economy in the hands of a relative few corporate giants with the power to