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Returning

Suzanne Kelly on Green Burial and the Embrace of Mortality

The fact is, “green” is the way we buried our dead over 150 years ago in the US. It’s the way many Indigenous peoples in North America have cared for their dead. This other, more recent, method is the anomaly.

Uniforms

For a job at Burger King, a prison in North Carolina, a girls’ school in Iran

Home Sick

Emily Kenway on the Health-Care Crisis No One’s Talking About

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Down in the Valley

Wendy Liu on the Tech Industry’s Power to Divide Us

Once I saw the development of new technology in class terms—how a particular kind of technology gives one group of people power over another—it started to feel more sinister.

Sunbeams

I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.

Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Sparrow’s Guide To Business

When you walk on sand, you leave footprints. When you work, you leave “workprints.” The people who come behind you will judge you by your workprints.

Unsheltered

Eric Tars On The Human Right To Housing

The Martin v. Boise decision stands for the very simple principle that punishing a homeless person for undertaking basic, life-sustaining activities like sleeping or sheltering themselves — when there’s no adequate alternative accessible to them — is cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

Sunbeams

The emergence of intelligence, I am convinced, tends to unbalance the ecology. In other words, intelligence is the great polluter. It is not until a creature begins to manage its environment that nature is thrown into disorder.

Clifford D. Simak, Shakespeare’s Planet

Sunbeams

To earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow has always been the lot of mankind. At least, ever since Eden’s slothful couple was served with an eviction notice. The scriptural precept was never doubted, not out loud. No matter how demeaning the task, no matter how it dulls the senses and breaks the spirit, one must work. Or else.

Studs Terkel