Like most countries through world history, Brazil is modernizing though the intensive mining of its natural resources. The United States did this. Russia/USSR did this. Australia, Canada, etc. Britain and France did so through mining the resources of their Asian and African colonies. China is doing it today. When developing world leaders criticize developed world […]
Author: Erik Loomis
Fantastic little oral history of Plan B on the day that the FDA decides whether to transition the pill to over-the-counter status, which I very much hope it does. Total Health and Human Services Secre
In 1992, I was a senior in high school. That spring, my town of Springfield, Oregon passed a notorious anti-gay ordinance that barred the city from taking any steps against discrimination. It was one
In one of the best blog posts of the year, Charles Pierce just destroys Jon Meachem’s analysis of Newt Gingrich. In part, beginning with quoting Meachem: But by the September-October debates, Newt had grown impressive “by standing back and offering a Wise Man’s view of the political shenanigans onstage and in Washington generally. “Gingrich is […]
Tonight, Politico hands Paul Ryan its award for Health Care Policymaker of the Year. Because inside the Beltway, actually crafting useful policy that helps people is meaningless. No doubt it’s o
Evidently Mexico has its own version of Rick Perry! Mexican presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto hit a book fair this weekend in what should have been an easy public relations stop. Too bad he g
Aaron Bady makes an interesting and pretty convincing argument that Occupy Oakland and the Occupy movement as a whole outside of Wall Street is best understood by grounding it in place. He argues that unlike Occupy Wall Street, Oakland and other movements around the country were specific reactions to problems within cities rather than strictly […]
Steven Greenhouse has a thought-provoking piece in the Times detailing how and why Boeing came to a labor agreement with its workers and wondering whether this is not the beginning a new “Grand
Chris Bertram lists the 46 races, circa 1914: African (black), Armenian, Bohemian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Cuban, Dalmatian, Dutch, East Indian, English, Finnish, Flemish, French, Germa
On this day in 1955, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged into the AFL-CIO. During the 1930s, dissatisfaction over the AFL’s conservatism and its unwillingness to organize industrial workers led to the creation of the CIO in 1935 under the leadership of United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis. […]
Before I retire from teaching, I wonder if I’ll be able to teach a course called “Lost Environments,” where I tell students about what were once coastal ecosystems that are now under
Americans’ have shaped narratives to make the Founding Fathers fit any number of political ideologies since at least the 1830s. It is a national passion to build connections between one’s