How a financial wizard took over a giant of American retailing, and presided over its epic decline.
Bankruptcy wasn't inevitable. It was Wall Street's business strategy.
Public schools are increasingly divided by race and class. John Oliver discusses the troubling trend towards school resegregation.
Following the alarming disappearance of a Saudi journalist and political dissident, John Oliver examines America's uncomfortably comfortable relationship with Saudi Arabia.
In my history of consumption class, I teach about #Sears, but what most people don't know is just how radical the catalogue was in the era of #Jim Crow. #twitterstoriansEvery time a black southerner went to the local store they were confronted with forced deference to white customers who would be served first.And the store would be filled with racist caricatures of black people in an effort to sell to white people.The stores were not self-service, so the black customers would have to wait. And then would have to ask the proprietor to give them goods (often on credit because...sharecropping). The landlord often owned the store. In every way shopping reinforced hierarchy. Until #SearsThe catalog undid the power of the storekeeper, and by extension the landlord. Black families could buy without asking permission. Without waiting. Without being watched. With national (cheap) prices!Southern storekeepers fought back. They organized catalogue bonfires in the street.These general stores often doubled as post offices. The owners would refuse to sell stamps to black people, or money orders, to use the catalogue services.Happened enough that sears instructed customers to evade the postmaster and directly speak to the mail carrier: “just give the letter and the money to the mail carrier and he will get the money order at the post office and mail it in the letter for you.”In an attempt to undermine #Sears, rumors spread that Sears was black (to get white customers to stop buying from him). Sold by mail “these fellows could not afford to show their faces as retailers” Sears, in turn, published photos to “prove” he was white.These rumors didn’t affect sales but show how race and commerce connected in the countryside. And how dangerous it was to the local order, to white supremacy, to have national markets.So as we think about #Sears today, let's think about how retail is not just about buying things, but part of a larger system of power. Every act of power contains the opportunity, and the means, for resistance.Wow. So much response! If you would like to know more about the larger history of Sears and resisting white supremacy, check out this video from our series on the history of capitalism. #thread. Also #JohnHenry and #webDubois.You *may* have noticed that race and capitalism were not just problems in the 19th century. As I write about, African-Americans have always had a less equal access to the market, whether as consumers or as workers. For more: amazon.com/Temp-American-…
Lindley Murray (27 March 1745 – 16 February 1826), was an American Quaker who moved to England and became a writer and grammarian.
John McWhorter from The Great Courses: LinguisticsLecture 17: Dialects—The Standard as Token of the Past
When a dialect of a language is used widely in writing and literacy is high, the normal pace of change is artificially slowed, as people come to see "the language" as on the page and inviolable. This helps create diglossia.Lecture 18: Dialects—Spoken Style, Written Style
We often see the written style of language as how it really "is" or "should be." But in fact, writing allows uses of language that are impossible when a language is only a spoken one.Lecture 19: Dialects—The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar
Understanding language change and how languages differ helps us see that what is often labeled "wrong" about people's speech is, in fact, a misanalysis.
John McWhorter from The Great Courses: LinguisticsLecture 15: Dialects—Where Do You Draw the Line?
Dialects of one language can be called languages simply because they are spoken in different countries, such as Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. The reverse is also true: The Chinese "dialects" are distinctly different languages.Lecture 16: Dialects—Two Tongues in One Mouth
Diglossia is the sociological division of labor in many societies between two languages, with a "high" one used in formal contexts and a "low" one used in casual ones—as in High German and Swiss German in Switzerland.
Surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination
Facebook’s use of “ethnic affinity” as a proxy for race is a prime example. The platform’s interface does not offer users a way to self-identify according to race, but advertisers can nonetheless target people based on Facebook’s ascription of an “affinity” along racial lines. In other words. race is deployed as an externally assigned category for purposes of commercial exploitation and social control, not part of self-generated identity for reasons of personal expression. The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both. ❧
October 15, 2018 at 09:34PM
Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump's rise. Now he's reveling in his achievements.
What I find false in some of his assumptions however is that while his idea about killing or being killed from an evolutionary standpoint is broadly true, humans have been able to do so much more by possessing logic and civility than the base “animals” he apparently idolizes. His premise has brought down our democratic structures and is causing us to devolve backwards instead of forwards–both within the larger animalistic structure he proposes as well as among our fellow people of the world. While Americans are infighting among ourselves, we’re losing ground to other countries who are rapidly catching up to us.
Somehow I feel like Gingrich is missing a chunk of modern history and the value of a Western liberal democracy, by which I’m talking about the philosophical version of liberal, and not his version of liberal meaning Democrat or “enemy.”
While he may think the Republicans are “winning” presently, what is generally happening is that a larger rift is opening up within the democracy and the two sides which really aren’t very apart are moving even further apart, particularly in their fighting. As a result, we’re spending far more time and energy fighting each other rather than competing against countries externally. From a game theoretic perspective each side fights harder in opposite directions, but the equilibrium point doesn’t really move very much for all the extra effort. Meanwhile, we’re exhausting our resources (and general happiness) which we could be employing to better ourselves, and particularly with respect to all the external factors (foreign powers, climate change, etc.) we should be working against.
He can continue to look at things from the Nixonian “man in the arena” perspective of his youth, but I would submit he should be looking at it from the wider “person in the world” perspective we’re all operating in in this millennia.
Hello makers, designers and enthusiasts! Welcome to NASA Space Apps Hackathon 2018 Pasadena, a three day event with presentations by industry professionals and 48 hours of hacking! Everyone is welcome to join and a background in coding or computers is not necessary. We will open the event on Friday with speakers from JPL, The Planetary Soceity, and Space Decentral. Saturday the hacking will begin and teams will tackle an array of challenges which are designed by NASA. Two teams from this portion will be selected by our judges to go on to the national round. Space Apps takes place in over 69 countries and is the largest hackathon in the world. Last year we had 28,000 participants and in 2016 the global winner came out of the Pasadena event.
I haven't listened to Exile on Main St in too long. # Why didn’t Elizabeth Warren hold on to the results of her study until Trump raised the issue again? Raising it herself just before the midterms seems like the most disadvantageous timing. Imagine if Trump re-stated his offer of $1 million, then she could release the study. Bonk. Wasted opportunity?#
