Benjamin Wachs is the author of the short story collection "A Guide to Bars and Nightlife in the Sacred City." His work has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, Playboy.com, San Francisco Magazine, and has been syndicated across Gatehouse Media. He tweets as @BenjaminWachs and his online home is www.FascinatingStranger.com.
Summary: As surveys show that free and open societies are dwindling around the world, nations including Russia and China are presenting alternatives to democracy. Energetic and passionate political movements in American and the world are increasingly undemocratic, claiming that representative government cannot solve 21st century challenges.
U.S. military drone operators are being honored for their service, even amid allegations that the drone program has used faulty intelligence, covered up the killing of civilians, encouraged operators to target children, and overlooked a culture of addiction and mental health problems.
Oil industry researchers made predictions about global warming decades before the world was talking about it, but lobbied against its own science to avoid changing their business model.
The news about China’s economy keeps getting worse. China’s pain is America’s gain in the short term, but if Chinese markets keep falling, eventually they’ll take America’s with them.
Volkswagen is likely to be successfully prosecuted by a number of countries for its environmental crimes; that makes it a notable exception among 21st century corporate criminals. Here’s why.
New research has re-opened the old question of whether the internet is making us lonelier. In fact it’s not making us “more” or “less” lonely, it’s changing the nature of loneliness in the 21st century.
[DIGEST: MSNBC, Bloomberg] The way people talk about how much the federal budget deficit is rising, you’d think the sky was falling. In fact, a Bloomberg Politics Poll shows that neither is true. As noted by The Rachel Maddow Show, 73 percent of Americans don’t know that the federal deficit it has shrunk every year … Continued
