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Usually exclusive to our physical magazine, we’ve treated non-subscribers to a selection of some of our best print pieces.
In high school the cool kids smoked. So I started smoking too. And I continued to smoke in university. I just changed brands. Gaulois were too pretentious; I went for British brands like Peter Stuyvesant, with its pure white pack.Then I started to hear murmurings: cigarettes cause lung cancer.It was still just a rumor — at least that’s how the industry spun it. “The link hasn’t been proven,” said Philip Morris. PM had marshaled a team of corporate lawyers and PR flacks — not to mention publicly skeptical doctors on their payroll. The evidence just isn’t there, they said. The average smoker’s chances of getting lung cancer from cigarettes is roughly the chance of being struck by lightning.So I kept puffing.But I tried to quit, again and again. Problem was, I couldn’t edit a film without smoking. You can imagine it: you’re immersed in the flow, the rational part of your brain is in park, the wild reactive part firing on instinct, and your hand instinctively reaches for a dart. For me back then smoking was woven into the ritual of doing creative work on a deadline.The magic of tobacco is that it’s both a stimulant and a relaxant. The smoke cloud itself is hypnotic.One morning, after a lot of boozing and chain-smoking through many nights of editing, I woke up feeling like shit. And I stopped smoking. Again.But this time I stayed clean. One, two, three days. On day four I woke up feeling . . . amazing. Clear skies.Not long after, I ran into one of my mother’s neighbors. He looked awful. I learned he was dying of lung cancer. He had only a few months to live. I looked in his eyes and saw that he had given up. I’d gotten lucky; many hadn’t.It dawned on me that Philip Morris did this. They knew they were killing people and they covered it up. They built their empire on a business plan to sell toxic addictive products to people who didn’t know any better. They were literally getting away with murder and had been for decades.That’s the moment I started to hate corporations.
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Every revolution, every authentic revolution, promises to redeem the failures of its predecessors. This is what Walter Benjamin thought — or at least, this is what Slavoj Žižek says Benjamin thought at the end of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012). Paraphrasing Benjamin, Žižek says in the film that all the unsettled ghosts of the past will at last find rest in the new freedom born out of the true revolution to come. Yet he warns the path to this freedom comes with no guarantees. There is no train of historical inevitability that can be ridden to the safe harbour of emancipation. Getting there all depends on a fickle crowd of free riders, a ragtag huddle of the flighty and the faithless. They should be a familiar bunch because, it turns out, they are us. Our liberation rests on nobody’s shoulders but our own.
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The UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the liberal international order sought to guarantee rights on an individual level. These promoted freedom of thought and expression, of religion, of movement and association and of sexual orientation, whereby ‘any particular freedom is to be respected only insofar as it does not violate the equal freedom of others.’ Within a liberal international order, such ‘rule by the people’ encompassed freedom of political participation, representation, expression and association. It also included having regular free, inclusive and equal elections, the presence of accountable and transparent political institutions to guarantee the individual liberties and rights of citizens, and access to competing information. At its core, the US endorsed electoral democracy as the central and unquestionable pillar of its preferred international order. Such social and political rights are seen as being generalizable to the internal basis of all countries, and hence the whole international system. They also produced a sense of solidarity among Western countries concerning the preservation of a common social and political basis.
Read More...Dive deep into long form features on everything from smartphone addiction to what a True-Cost global marketplace would mean for the economy.
An Interview with Kohei Saito, Kohei Saito, a professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo, seems poised to become the new Thomas Piketty, winning scores of converts to anti-capitalist economics within mainstream Western culture. His new book has just been released in the United States as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto
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I am four. A man who is supposed to take care of me touches me in a way that I know is wrong, even when I don't have the vocabulary to explain it. When my mother, white with rage, complains to my family, she is told off. In Kerala there is a saying: whether the leaf encroaches on the thorn or the thorn encroaches on the leaf, it's the leaf that tears. In other words, it is not their job to protect the girl; it is the mothers' responsibility to protect her daughter.I am eleven. I hear what's said about me: Too bossy. Talks too much. Doesn't have enough girlfriends. Doesn't help out in the kitchen. At a family vacation, a man six times my age puts his disgusting mouth on mine without my consent. My aunts and uncles are in the room just next door. Many years later, recounting this story to my mother, I realize the violence I experienced was a mere slight compared to what she and her mother
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Nat Turner was born in Virginia in 1800, the son of slaves and the property of plantation owners.His rebellion, which was launched August 21, 1831, and lasted two days and two nights, saw the killing of some fifty-five white men, women, and children, some (including the family of the man who owned him) in their sleep. To begin with, the rebels numbered just six besides Turner, but by the end they had recruited sixty to their cause. The plan was to go from plantation to plantation, house to house, blazing a trail of terror on their way to the county seat, where Turner aimed to raid the armory for weapons and ammunition. Today the seat of Southampton County is known as Courtland, but back then it was called — what else? — Jerusalem.
Read More...Our fingers are on the global pulse, counting beats as we stutter towards the throes of death. If you want to know what Adbusters thinks about the news, this is where you find it.
We're in the middle of a guerrilla marketing war for the future of the planet. Conventional weapons are useless — all we have are ideas. These are the best of our culture jams.
Listen to the voice of Adbusters proffering sweet ASMR vibes about the end of capitalism and where Occupy Wall Street went wrong.
Memes can be cinematic too. Turn up the volume and watch the chaos of the world unfold and disintegrate before your very eyes.
Prime Day, Amazon’s yearly deal-hawking hoopla for its swindled subscribers, begins on June 21. And there’s never been a better occasion to cancel your Prime membership and boycott Amazon and all its subsidiaries (which include AbeBooks, Amazon Studios, Audible, Book Depository, ComiXology, Goodreads, IMDb, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zappos, and dozens more).
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For two decades Purdue Pharma peddled the falsehood that OxyContin, the painkiller at the heart of the deadly opioid epidemic, was safe and non-addictive. “More people in the United States died from overdoses involving opioids in 2017,” in Nature’s account, ”than from HIV- or AIDS-related illnesses at the peak of the AIDS epidemic.”
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Our world is being carved into two spheres of influence. For now, those spheres are limited merely to economic competition. But as the the tension mounts, there is a real possibility that the China-vs-U.S. face-off could spill over into an all-out war — a global fight for worldwide hegemony — maybe even World War 3.
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