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Author: Sarah Jaffe

Columns

The Labor Movement We Need
February 02, 2017
I don’t blame labor leaders for going to meet with Trump, but I think we should have had a much more deliberate plan for making sure that those that went to meet with Trump were representatives of a broader working class contingent that front-loaded issues that were of concern ...

Odd Time to be Evenhanded
February 02, 2017
One of the rarely acknowledged liabilities of a corporate-run media is its diehard resistance to plain speech and direct action. In one of my former, more respectable editing gigs, I was soberly instructed never to use the word “reform” to characterize pending ...

#DeleteUber, Delete Everything
February 01, 2017
Like many billion-dollar startups, Uber is notorious for its self-regard. One nugget buried in this week’s news serves as a reminder: until a few days ago, Uber had no automated system to process users’ requests to delete their accounts. That meant that every time a user ...

Originalism Is Dumb
February 01, 2017
Donald Trump has nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Gorsuch will replace Antonin Scalia, whose death a year ago has left a vacancy that Republicans refused to allow Barack Obama to fill. In the minds of conservatives, Gorsuch is a worthy heir to ...

Justice in—and from—the Classroom
January 31, 2017
It really helped to expose the fact that there are a majority of us in the school district that see a much bigger purpose for education than just preparing our students for a low-wage job or shipping them through the school-to-prison pipeline, that we want education to be about ...

Quick-Fire
January 31, 2017
In many ways, President Donald J. Trump has followed a script set down by President Richard M. Nixon. As a candidate for the presidency, Trump cribbed lines liberally from his Republican predecessor. Like Nixon, he claimed to speak on behalf of an aggrieved “silent ...

Presumed Terrorists
January 31, 2017
Welcome to the United States! These are words that hundreds of thousands of people traveling to America yearn to hear after they hand their documents to the immigration officials sitting in glass box at the airport. The moments until they are uttered are pregnant with dread and ...

Extreme Hating
January 30, 2017
I had always hoped, our nation’s first President wrote to one of its first refugees, “that this land might— become a safe and agreeable Asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” It was 1787 and François Van der Kemp, ...

High on the Apocalypse
January 30, 2017
Maybe we all just decided it was cooler to be George Orwell (who came from money) than H. G. Wells (who did not)—cooler to be the smirker saying, “Pah, it'll never work,” than to be the kid chirping, “Here is what we can do.” The H. G. Wells we find profiled in Krishan ...

Dispatch from the JFK Refugee Rally
January 28, 2017
I’m at JFK Terminal 4, where hundreds of people and growing every minute are here to denounce the unconscionable and unconstitutional executive orders that Donald Trump signed yesterday and that now are tearing families apart here at JFK Airport, we know of at least twelve ...

Make American Dystopias Great Again
January 27, 2017
It was a bright cold day in January, and the blogosphere was awash in the world of 1984. After senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway took to the airwaves to declare that her White House colleagues operated in a world of “alternative facts” it only seemed logical—and ...

Putting Our Bodies on the Line
January 26, 2017
I am not sure how someone goes from the Women’s March to direct action, frankly. I think the thing that would be closest would be the 350.org arrests that happened in Washington [against the Keystone XL pipeline]. That was people who decided to get arrested for climate change. ...