by Alessandro De Giorgi* The materials presented in this blog series draw from an ethnographic study on prisoner reentry I have been conducting between March 2011 and March 2014 in a neighborhood of West Oakland, California, plagued by chronically high … Continue reading →

How the Camp Fire Was a Social Disaster by Michael J. Coyle* The Camp Fire, which crushed the lives and livelihoods of the 30,000 residents of the town of Paradise, California, was not just a natural disaster. It was a … Continue reading →

by John Raines* On March 8, 1971, a group calling itself the “Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI” broke into the FBI agency in Media, Pennsylvania, and removed all the files. I was part of that group. We sorted the … Continue reading →

by Alessandro De Giorgi* The news has not garnered much attention on the national media, yet it is rather striking: for the first time in the last twenty years or so, crime has been rising in the United States for … Continue reading →

by James Kilgore* I lived in South Africa during the 1990s, a period of transition from apartheid to some form of democracy. During this restructuring, much of the political debate centered on compensation for the violence and inequity of the … Continue reading →

by Cliff Welch* While Olympic athletes faced victory and defeat along the putrid shores of Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay, on the shores of sparkly Lake Paranoá in Brasilia, Brazil’s 36th president, Dilma Rousseff, faced only defeats as her enemies … Continue reading →

by Janelle Reinelt* Last June I saw Tony Kushner’s epic new play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It is directed by Tony Taccone. Since then, I haven’t … Continue reading →

In light of recent controversies among progressives and radicals concerning Prop. 62, which would abolish the death penalty in California and replace it with life without parole, we are hosting two pieces that look at the hard issues surrounding the … Continue reading →

by José A. Brandariz, Manuel Maroto, and Cristina Fernández-Bessa* Spanish conservatives have not ever been interested in winning over their political contenders, they are just interested in defeating them. Guillem Martínez, journalist and writer The resurgence of the Catalan independentist … Continue reading →