An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.
by C.M. Lewis. Solidarity has a new life. Few speeches at a union convention go without some mention of solidarity; it is part of the lingua franca of the labor movement. But now that the rise of the Occupy movement and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, among other forces, have popularized left-wing rhetoric for a broader audience, it’s worth examining: when we say “solidarity,” what do we mean?
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by Sophie Haigney. Corporate jargon is dead lingo. Its purpose is generally to elide, or to misdirect, or to gloss over the realities of the workplace and working life. But the assumptions that it rests upon, when even lightly examined, proved to be revealing—and damning.
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by Benjamin Aleshire. I drug my canvas sack through snow, packed with words: They / are super-predators who must be brought to heel. Technically I was a / contractor, buying these words whole-sale
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by Bryan Wisch. In winter 2011, the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, John Huppenthal, a former state senator, tried to ban a popular Mexican American Studies program that was being taught in the Tucson Unified School District.
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by Mark Cugini. In the final days of the gilded age, the last remaining son of Cornelius Vanderbilt buried a horse’s heart in the forest and took a shit in the hole.
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by sung. Do u think my neighbor Michael who can’t tell whether I’m a man or a woman hates me because I don’t mow my lawn or because he can’t tell whether I’m a man or a woman
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by Tom Abi Samra. I thought it was an earthquake, only for the shaking to be followed by a loud blast. Trained during the 2006 Lebanon-Israel War, I could tell it wasn’t a bomb, at least not of the type to which we’ve grown accustomed.
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by Kyle Kern. In his regular bi-monthly opinion column in the Washington Post, president of Purdue University and former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels defended his decision to re-open the university’s campus this fall, stating that failing to do so “would be not only anti-scientific but also an unacceptable breach of duty.” Daniels, a former executive with pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly (perhaps best known for their 1.4 billion dollar settlement with the federal government for falsely marketing a drug as antipsychotic without FDA approval) and director of the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, made note of record-breaking tuition deposits from the incoming freshman class while insisting that young adults are at “near-zero risk” of death.
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by Jason Crane. The other day at my job — / wearing my corporate uniform, / the one with the logo on the left breast —
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by Shane Burley. White polos, pressed khakis, tiki torches, and chants of “you will not replace us” serve as shorthand for a trauma now seared into our memories. The largest openly neo-Nazi gathering in years, the Unite the Right rally that marred Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12th, 2017, is now a defining symbol of the escalating threat posed by newly emboldened white nationalists.
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