“War Happens in Dark Places, Too,” Contingent Magazine
Growing up in the South, people talk about the Civil War a lot. One thing I never learned about was the number of white Southerners who refused to fight for the Confederacy, for whatever reasons, and depending on their activities had a large impact on Confederate infrastructure that I also never heard about. This piece looks at who some of those people were, what they did, and how enslaved people helped them. — Jonathan Stegall, user experience engineer
“Man used as proof that ‘Seattle Is Dying’ tells his story,” Crosscut
The Seattle nonprofit news outlet Crosscut exposed a major journalistic failure by one of the city’s broadcast stations, KOMO TV. The news station aired an hourlong special about the city’s widening income disparities, which caught the attention of national politicians ranging from Mike Huckabee to Sarah Palin, who said the footage of poverty shows “our beautiful Emerald City succumbing to socialist policies.” But there’s way more to the city’s story, especially when it comes to one subject in the video: Robert Champagne. “He, like many other people filmed by the news team but never spoken to on camera, is assumed to be homeless,” writes Crosscut. “Champagne has been homeless before — chronically so, in fact — but he is not homeless now.” — Jessica Lee, local government reporter
“For decades, Garfield telephones kept washing ashore in France. Now the mystery has been solved,” The Washington Post
Plastic Garfield telephones have been turning up on beaches in northwestern France for more than 30 years, which honestly sounds like the start to a strange horror movie. The Washington Post reports locals may finally have found a real answer for kitty litter. — Walker Orenstein, environment and workforce reporter
“The Innovator’s Agenda: How the busiest of buzzwords was enlisted in the capitalist cause,” The Baffler
Praise of “innovation” in the economy is so ubiquitous these days — as one example, notice charter school advocates and teachers unions both claiming to be the true educational innovators, or Minnesota’s own DEED commissioner lauding the “innovation economy” in these pages — that it seems almost inherently good. (Sure, some workers may be displaced through this creative disruption, but there’s a solution for them: reinventing their careers through innovation!) Is it? In The Baffler, John Patrick Leary argues that the promotion of innovation, rather than being a universal good, has been a specific project of a specific class whose benefits are anything but evenly distributed to society. — Tom Nehil, news editor
