- After Two Prisoners Escape, Corrections Officers Torture Those Who Remain.
- The Monster and the State.
- The Gentrification of Sesame Street.
- 50 Years after the Watts Riots, There is Still a Crisis in the Black Community.
- Red Abolitionism.
- Who Really Runs the AirBnBs? Spoiler alert: rich people.
- How is the Slave Trade Related to the Spread of HIV/AIDS.
- Time is Political.
The move to more flexible scheduling has come alongside a shift from full-time to part-time work. One industry analyst reported that the retail sector went from being about 70 to 80 percent full-time jobs several decades ago to approximately 70 percent part-time jobs today. Retail employees comprise 11 percent of the US workforce, but 18 percent of those who are involuntarily part-time.
While erratic scheduling makes it difficult for someone not working a forty-hour week to find and hold a second job, relying on part-time work benefits employers — who can more easily vary hours and schedules, avoid overtime pay, and offer fewer benefits. Many companies have store policies that provide benefits only to full-time workers, and the Affordable Care Act applies only to workers employed thirty or more hours per week.
- Amnesty International’s Long-Due Support for Sex Workers Rights.
- Only the Rich Can Afford to Write About Poverty.
- The Breadth of Hillary Clinton’s “New College Compact” Could Be Its Downfall.
- How Climate Change is Melting Polar History.
- The Forgotten, Pro-War History of the POW/MIA Flag.
- How Presidents Manipulate Public Opinion.
- The Trigger Warning Myth:
The thinking behind the idea that trigger warnings are a form of censorship is fundamentally illogical: those who offer warnings, at our professional discretion, about potentially triggering material are doing so precisely because we’re about to teach it! If we used trigger warnings to say, effectively, “don’t read this, it’s scary,” then there’d be no need to warn in the first place; we’d just leave the material off the syllabus.
[…]
[T]rigger warnings are, in practice, just one of a set of tools that professors use with varying degrees of formality to negotiate the give-and-take of classroom interactions. If you take away the media hysteria surrounding trigger warnings, you’re left with a mode of conversational priming that we all use: “You might want to sit down for this”; “I’m not sure how to say this, but…” It’s hardly anti-intellectual or emotionally damaging to anticipate that other people may react to traumatic material with negative emotions, particularly if they suffer from PTSD; it’s human to engage others with empathy. It’s also human to have emotional responses to life and literature, responses that may come before, but in no way preclude, a dispassionate analysis of a text or situation.
Scott Ross 