John Bellamy Foster

After three years of being stuck with one arm pinned under a toddler going scroll, scroll, scroll, I finally struck a blow for humanity and swore off reading the news and ideas on my phone (but please text me, friends!). Back to print! Back to mags and newsps (purchased, even!). I've read two whole globe and mails (more than in the year previous) and I'm halfway through a New Yorker and I feel great, like a noble throwback, a gladiator for the integrity of journalism and our neural connections. "ARE YOU NOT INFORMED??!?!?!" And then there is the Monthly Review, which I went somehow 36 years without reading because it's gloriously informative, printing an ugly blow-by-blow of the current US government's anti-environment efforts to date and connecting the political crisis in Brazil to the resource crash (why does nobody but the Marxists do this? It's like sanctions on Russia have nothing to do with Putin, or the 75% drop in the lira with Erdogan) and three Chinese economists reminding everybody how the global financial system is constructed to favour Western countries and especially the US and keep everyone else down. They rely a bit too much on what they take to be prescient quotes from past issues (the perils of a storied history I guess) but there is such good knowledge here, presented without hooks or jollying you along, and I've never felt so alive (he said, pecking a 1000% superfluous librarything review that will be read by no one into a tiny box on a screen while shirking his precarious internet-based job).… (altro)