23 March, 2012 // Category: Foreign policy, International, Terror/War
Last week’s massacre of 16 Afghan civilians in Panjwai by an American serviceman, and the death of six British soldiers in Afghanistan the previous week, have focused attention on the support, or lack of it, among the public for Britain’s continued military presence in the country. A YouGov...
08 February, 2012 // Category: Activism, Gender equality, Vision/Strategy
Emma Dowling was a panellist in one of the discussions at last week's event to mark the publication of Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason. Earlier that day, she discussed her analysis with NLP co-editor John Brissenden. Your work seems to be very wide-ranging, eclectic almost, and I...
20 September, 2011 // Category: Activism, Corporate power, Media
Among the small, nerdy circles of media academics and democracy activists, Dan Hind’s The Return of the Public1 has attracted a great deal of attention in the year since its publication. Hind presents a wide-ranging, well-founded and often witty account of the Athenian and Kantian origins of the...
12 August, 2011 // Category: Corporate power, Media
PR. Those two little initials seem so harmless, don’t they? The very use of PR as a prefix seems to diminish whatever follows, by rendering it faintly ridiculous. PR person. PR stunt. Two decades later, the popular image of public relations still bears traces of the 1990s sitcom Absolutely...
09 June, 2011 // Category: Corporate power, Education, Employment & Welfare, Politics
Ross Perlin is a researcher for the Himalayan Languages Project in southwest China. He has written on forgotten histories and disappearing languages in the U.S., China, and the former Soviet Union. His first book, Intern Nation, has recently been published by Verso. He met with John Brissenden to...
09 June, 2011 // Category: Book Review, Corporate power, Employment & Welfare
Ross Perlin’s new book, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy, offers an alarming picture of the global internship explosion. But it also shows why this is a class issue that an invigorated Left should see as a priority, and one where it can win. You would...
15 May, 2011 // Category: Education
‘In its relation to society, a free university should be expected to be, in a sense, “subversive.” We take for granted that creative work in any field will challenge prevailing orthodoxy. A physicist who refines yesterday’s experiment, an engineer who merely seeks to improve existing...
19 April, 2011 // Category: Activism, Economy, Media, Vision/Strategy
“It remains…an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part...