I Asked a Mining Billionaire About His Environmental Philanthropy. It Didn’t Go Well.

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Earlier this year, a billionaire investor and philanthropist named Tom Kaplan auctioned off a small Rembrandt drawing of a lion at Sotheby’s in New York City. It sold for nearly $18 million. A press release prior to the auction noted that Kaplan would donate […]

Why Billionaires Pay Much Less Tax Than the Average American

This story was originally published on Gabriel Zucman’s substack, to which you can subscribe here (for English) or here (for French). Last week, Jeff Bezos made an unexpected contribution to the debate about taxation in the United States, claiming that billionaires like himself pay a lot of tax and that it would be pointless to ask them to […]

Tax Me If You Can

Democracy, for most of its existence, has managed to coexist with oligarchy, but only on the condition that oligarchs exert their influence quietly. Citizens, including ordinary Americans, are generally willing to tolerate the super-rich, but the arrangement breaks down when a small group of exceedingly wealthy people are perceived to be distorting and impairing democracy […]

Exclusive: The Only Woman on Death Row in Mississippi Alleges New Civil Rights Violations in Confinement

Lisa Jo Chamberlin, who spoke to a Mississippi reporter in January about her experiences as the only woman on the state’s death row and her allegations of cruel and unusual punishment behind bars, now says that after speaking to the press, she faced targeted retaliation by prison officers for having gone public about her concerns, […]

Welcome to the Insecurity-Industrial Complex

Affordability is the new buzzword. It’s yapped by politicians and pundits across the spectrum. It’s as popular as a new TikTok dance. And it’s genuinely an important and mobilizing concept. But the truth is, it doesn’t really capture what’s ailing us. What makes this moment unique is insecurity. Struggling with bills isn’t new to most […]

Austerity and Inequality in the UK Has Had a Severe Impact Upon Health Life Expectancy Over Last Fifteen Years

The United Kingdom is facing a quiet but profound public health crisis, one that cannot be dismissed as a statistical anomaly or blamed solely on individual lifestyle choices. New research showing a decline in healthy life expectancy (HLE) should serve as a serious warning: people are not just living shorter, healthy lives; they are spending […]

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The American Experiment Has Been Infected by Oligarchs

There’s a virus in our tax system. A stealth virus, it was embedded in America’s economic DNA for a century, biding its time, waiting for the appropriate conditions to reveal itself. And then we created those conditions, unleashing it to infect our institutions of culture and democracy, replicate, and burst forth to infect anew. An […]

Have You Ever Wondered Why the Richest People and Their Puppets Deny Climate Destruction?

The Planet Is in Crisis and the Wealthy Are Burning It Every few years the same uncomfortable claim resurfaces: the Earth has too many people and I admit I am one of them. With almost nine billion humans sharing the planet, there is an argument to suggest that environmental collapse is simply the inevitable result […]

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Teaching Kids to Read: How One School District Gets It Right

The schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well. According to data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford […]

Ibram X. Kendi vs. America’s “Antiracism Backlash”

Just a few years ago, historian and activist Ibram X. Kendi seemed to be everywhere. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, he became one of the leading voices on racism in America—and particularly what he described as antiracism. In 2019, his book How to Be an Antiracist became a bestseller. And later, […]

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