Zuckerberg & Chan Are Us
Philanthrocapitalism and the public good
Almost forty-eight years to the day before Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced the creation of their limited liability company and pledged to give away 99% of their Facebook shares within their lifetimes, a lawyer lectured a roomful of stockbrokers on “How to Obtain Maximum Tax Advantages by Using Securities …
A Grandchild of the Bomb
As Lindsey Freeman reminds us in Longing for the Bomb, Margaret Mead once worried in the 1960s about the still-youthful Oak Ridge, Tennessee (“The Atomic City”), becoming a “city without grandmothers” (p. 175), or a place where there are no guardians of the memory of Oak Ridge culture. Fittingly enough, though, Freeman’s grandmother becomes an important punctuation point in the book, …
Tunisia: Invisible Alienation, Visible Violence
A relational view of Tunisian youths
Analyzing the youth is notoriously a difficult task. How should we define this social group? Can we even speak of “the youth” in the singular? With regard to the Arab Uprisings (a phrase which I prefer to the loaded “Arab Spring”), many did not …
On Pope Francis, Climate Change, and Global Capitalism
A psychological perspective
Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Laudato si’: On Care for our Common Home, has drawn worldwide attention to climate change and its relationship to global capitalism in advance of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change to be held in Paris in late November …
