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The Newspaper Guild is joining with the unpaid bloggers at the Huffington Post, calling on them to withhold content. In a letter that calls the Post’s practice of publishing the work of unpaid writers “unprofessional and unethical,” the newspaper union outlined demands, including a pay schedule and the clear separation of editorial content from advertising. Arianna Huffington mocked the idea of a strike earlier this month, saying, “Go ahead, go on strike,” and that “no one really notices.”

Read it at The Wrap

Posted at 7:08 AM, Mar 18, 2011

Arianna Huffington can no longer act as if she is ‘Progressive’ while practicing like the acolyte of Milton Friedman that she is.The mask of that ‘Progressivism’ has been forcefully removed by the sale to AOL. Ms. Huffington is an Empire Builder, pure and simple: the reality of Capitalism, of the ‘Free Market’ is as unpleasant as the images it produces are seductive and winning.

About This Book

• About the Authors
• Reviews

Franz Göll was a thoroughly typical Berliner. He worked as a clerk, sometimes as a postal employee, night watchman, or publisher’s assistant. He enjoyed the movies, ate spice cake, wore a fedora, tamed sparrows, and drank beer or schnapps. He lived his entire life in a two-room apartment in Rote Insel, Berlin’s famous working-class district. What makes Franz Göll different is that he left behind one of the most comprehensive diaries available from the maelstrom of twentieth-century German life. Deftly weaving in Göll’s voice from his diary entries, Fritzsche narrates the quest of an ordinary citizen to make sense of a violent and bewildering century.

Peter Fritzsche paints a deeply affecting portrait of a self-educated man seized by an untamable impulse to record, who stayed put for nearly seventy years as history thundered around him. Determined to compose a “symphony” from the music of everyday life, Göll wrote of hungry winters during World War I, the bombing of Berlin, the rape of his neighbors by Russian soldiers in World War II, and the flexing of U.S. superpower during the Reagan years. In his early entries, Göll grappled with the intellectual shockwaves cast by Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, and later he struggled to engage with the strange lifestyles that marked Germany’s transition to a fluid, dynamic, unmistakably modern society.

With expert analysis, Fritzsche shows how one man’s thoughts and desires can give poignant shape to the collective experience of twentieth-century life, registering its manifold shocks and rendering them legible.

Description

The relationship between sociology and social critique has haunted the discipline since its origins. Does critique divert sociology from its scientific project? Or is critique the ultimate goal of sociology, without which the latter would be a futile activity disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people? This issue has underpinned two divergent theoretical orientations that can be found in the discipline today: the critical sociology that was developed in its most elaborate form by Pierre Bourdieu, and the pragmatic sociology of critique developed by Luc Boltanski and his associates. Continue reading →

Description

Jackson Pollock, the towering American artist who was to revolutionize twentieth-century art with his “dripping” painting technique, grew up between the late 1920s and the late 1940s, the youngest of five boys born in the American West. Though often apart, whether they were traveling for work or for studies, sons and parents kept in close touch through their regular exchange of letters. Their correspondence offers an invaluable insight into the formation of one of America’s most influential artists, but it also draws a unique portrait of America itself between two momentous events in its history: the Great Depression and World War II. Continue reading →