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| Summer 2010 | Vol:XIII-1 | Whole #: 49 |
Green Is the New Green: Social Media and the Post-Election Crisis in Iran, 2009
Negar Mottahedeh
The Persian language blogosphere is rich, varied, and dynamic. Of the 100 million blogs registered around the world in 2005, 700,000 were Persian language, either inside Iran or in the diaspora. Of these, over 60,000 are updated frequently. With over 20 million Iranians connecting to the internet, and over 600,000 Iranians signed up on Facebook by the presidential election of the summer of 2009, the Iranian cyber community is by far the most dynamic such community in the Middle East, and one that is unambiguously diverse.
| Joanne Landy | February 4, 2010 |
Former New Politics editor Kent Worcester has written a nice appreciation of New Politics and its covers by Bob Gill.
| Lois Weiner | December 15, 2009 |
"All the news that's fit to print" is, of course, the slogan of the New York Times. But who determines what's "fit" and why?
We read much liberal hand-wringing about what will become of democracy without daily newspapers and reporters who serve as watchdogs of government. We need an independent press, for sure. But we don't have one.
| Lois Weiner | December 12, 2009 |
The New York Times provides a steady diet of glowing PR about the neoliberal policies implemented throughout the world to defund, privatize, and fragment public control of education. Two key projects are charter schools (designed to dismantle public school systems and replace them with individual schools or privately-owned and controlled networks) and “fast track” programs to eliminate traditional teacher education (deskilling teaching and allowing standardized tests to dictate what is taught.)
Interested in "bad guys" - but not bad systems
Barbara Garson August 5, 2009
While researching a book on The Great Recession (or whatever we wind up calling this economic downturn) I noticed that I couldn’t find any unemployed bankers who had actually handled the “toxic assets” that supposedly caused the crisis. I started to look for them systematically and eventually discovered that they were still employed. Furthermore, their activity of creating and trading collateralized debt obligations and the SWAPS that insured them was, in fact, booming.