Imagine you hear gunshots down the street and you call the police, but they take an hour to show up. Imagine the victim is your son, and you don’t call the ambulance because you know it isn’t coming, so you drive to the hospital yourself. These are real stories from Detroit, a city so broke […]

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Our fantasies of the predatory and non-conscious undead have something to do with the impasses in our social-political lives. Our social-political-economic world is founded on predation and unshakeable hierarchies. No other world is imaginable. How can it be changed? We find ourselves unable to say. But we can imagine how it could be destroyed. Asteroids, […]

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For most of Mad Men‘s five seasons, Don Draper—the super cool, super successful Madison Avenue creative director—has been something of a superhero, with the seemingly infinite ability to reinvent himself. But in season six, which ended last month, Don Draper has come closer to the edge, as his tragic childhood comes back to haun him […]

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Estimating the actual effective income tax rates that U.S. corporations pay is tricky. Tax returns are confidential documents under strict laws, never released by the IRS for public scrutiny. Corporate accountants and tax lawyers abide by rigid professional codes of secrecy. The information that corporations include in their publicly available financial statements is often incomplete. […]

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Google operates its own system of private buses. The coaches zip up and down the San Francisco peninsula five days a week. The buses are sorting mechanisms. They help re-organize the Bay Area geographically, residentially, racially, between the tech industry’s uber-haves, and the rest who have not the luck to be employed by a company […]

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