When the life Sontag loved fell away and the death she feared took over, relaxation set into her body for the first time, a smile appeared on her lips and her brow unfurled.

A new capitalism – brutal and conquering – is moving in. It’s the capitalism of a new category of vulture funds: private equity funds with the appetite of an ogre that command colossal amounts of capital.

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality. (Cover story of Adbusters Issue #79, hitting the newsstands now.)

In her iconic series, Chinese-born, German-raised artist Yang Liu uses simple pictograms depicting key cultural differences between East and West. China is represented by the red side and Germany by the blue.

Amidst all the hoopla of ad campaigns, business news and growth projections, a close examination of our consumer culture reveals a very ugly truth: it thrives on the death of nature, and charges the cost to future generations.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We still have time to redesign our economic model. All it takes is a critical mass of visionaries to step forward.

Val Plumwood saw the danger of the western attitude towards nature decades before eco-consciousness went mainstream.

What’s in a name? The line between “terrorist” and “state terror” blurs with over 30,000 Kurds killed by the Turkish army.

The system is busted. That much is clear. Now many people are experimenting with alternatives. Roberto Mangabeira Unger has long been one of those on the cutting edge of fundamental reform. Finally he has the chance to change the course of history.

Net neutrality has become a rallying cry for a new generation of media activists. A new media democracy movement is spawning from these Big Telecom acts of aggression, and the movement is having a surprising level of success.

A growing number of economists are bravely asking: What factors make people happy?