Issue #287

Who watches the watchers? Big Data goes unchecked The National Security Agency might be tracking your phone calls. But private industry is prying far more deeply into your life. Commercial data brokers know if you have diabetes. Your electric company can see what time you come home at night. And tracking companies can tell where you…

‘Year of the Republican establishment’ narrative loses even more credibility After this week’s “Super Tuesday” (eight states holding primaries), there remain 28 states with nominating contests on tap, and another six with runoffs. But all of the closely contested Republican Senate primaries that represented most of the national excitement prior to November have come and…

‘They refuse to admit they were wrong’: How nightmare prosecutors pervert American justice Last week, historian Rick Perlstein wrote an important piece about the Nixon pardon, which he shows was the true beginning of the political culture that holds that business elites and government actors cannot be held accountable for corruption and malfeasance because it will “destabilize”…

The problem with Piketty: “Capital” destroys right-wing lies, but there’s one solution it forgets What makes Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” such a triumph is that it seems to have been written specifically to demolish the great economic shibboleths of our time. The stock market is not an instrument of economic democracy, it…