The New York Times, 2024, 10:59… The percentage of workers who belong to a union plunged to its lowest level on record in 2022. In this video, Jeff Seal, a video journalist and comedian, argues for the wider use of an industry mechanism known as a minimum standards council to strengthen the labor movement and empower workers.
Hail Satan? (2019) is an exciting documentary that focuses on non-theistic satanism as a means to maintain a secular democracy. The film presents The Satanic Temple as a religious and political organization where satanism functions as a socio-political counter myth. They don’t see themselves as anti-Christianity but rather post-Christianity, and they advocate for religious pluralism. It is very intersectional, too!
Vice, 2022, 9:58… Concerns surrounding the environment and the climate crisis are no longer just the focus of liberals and the left. Eco-fascism is a growing racist ideology on the extreme right, marrying the ideas of environmentalism with white supremacy and ethnonationalism. With the climate crisis worsening by the day, eco-fascist thought has deepened alongside it.
Freethink, 2021, 5:34… From guerilla gardening to pop-up parks, tactical urbanism is catching the world by storm. The growing movement is characterized by the temporary altering of city infrastructure through citizen-led initiatives. When tactical urbanists see something wrong in their cities, they start dreaming up ways to fix it themselves.
Vice News, 2021, 5:01… A small group of activists in Chicago's Southeast side just finished a month-long hunger strike to protest the movement of a metal shredder to their neighborhood, saying it will cause dangerous pollution and make their community sick. They're calling it an environmental justice issue -- and they see it as life or death.
Vox, 2020, 9:09… The image of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists during a medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City is an enduring image of silent protest. But the key to understanding it goes beyond the black-gloved fists. All three medal winners, including silver medalist Peter Norman of Australia, wore buttons that read “Olympic Project for Human Rights.” The Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) was a coalition of prominent athletes formed in 1967 that threatened to boycott participating in the upcoming Olympic games, in order to draw attention to systemic racism in the United States.
DW Documentary, 2020, 49:52… Who has power over the emoji? Where are emojis coming from? There is one "High Council" of online communication that is difficult to access and has the power over our emoji selection on the keyboard: The Unicode Consortium. So what does it take to get a new emoji on the phone's keyboard? Why is the LGBTQI rainbow flag emoji in the keyboards, but not the one that stands for transgender people? Where lies the power to make such decisions?
Vice News, 2019, 10:21… Pidgeon Pagonis’ childhood memories include surgeries, hormone therapy, and repeated inspections of their genitals. When they turned 18 and got a copy of their medical records, they finally understood why. The first page had a handwritten note: “46 XY male pseudohermaphrodite.” The procedures that followed were also listed: a clitoral reduction, vaginoplasty, and surgery to remove undescended testes. For Pagonis, the results of some of these procedures have been both physically and psychologically damaging.
Vice News, 2019, 10:27… Kendrick Ransome started out farming a few years ago with just a hoe, a rake, and a shovel. He could have used support getting his hog and vegetable business off the ground, but he was wary of asking institutions for help. “My big brother told me, ‘Stay away from loans,’” said Ransome. In 1925, most farmers in his rural hometown of Edgecombe County, North Carolina, were black. But now, the 26-year-old is an anomaly. “When they did take out loans and they were unable to pay them back, you lose everything you got — that’s including your farm and your land for your family.” Ransome’s fear of institutions is based in the centuries of discrimination black farmers have faced across the country. But despite that history, he and other young black Americans are reclaiming the trade. The forces pushing black farmers off their land in the 20th century were manifold, and the impact was devastating. In 1920, there were more than 925,000 black farmers; by 2017, there were fewer than 46,000, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Quartz, 2019, 7:53… Thai restaurants are abundant and popular in many parts of the world. This has a lot to do with the Thai government actively promoting Thai food overseas for more than a decade. The strategy has been so successful that it inspired a new trend in foreign policy: gastrodiplomacy. And food isn’t just a diplomatic tool for governments. There’s a new kind of gastrodiplomacy on the rise, one that’s led by people who have left their governments behind. Quartz News went to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the refugee capital of America, to visit a 25-year-old gastrodiplomat who fled war in Somalia, rebuilt his life, and connects neighbors through his mouthwatering Somali samosas.
Inside Edition, 2019, 5:17… Are they evil or just misunderstood? The documentary "Hail Satan?" explores those questions while following the rise of the Satanic Temple. Director Penny Lane says the creation of the film took her on a spiritual and educational journey. A goal of her film was to debunk myths and misconceptions about this religion. "Modern Satanism is an atheistic religion," Lane says. "There's no sort of belief in supernatural deities at the core." InsideEdition.com's Mara Montalbano has more.
CBS Sunday Morning, 2019, 5:57… Pink is the most divisive color in American society, associated with gender stereotypes that leave some seeing red. After gaining favor in Europe as the preferred color for the fashionable and aristocratic, pink became linked with notions of sugar and spice and everything nice – and that's when businesses started seeing green.
The Verge, 2019, 4:48… Amazon announced plans in November for a $2 billion headquarters in New York’s Long Island City, also known as HQ2. Almost from the beginning, New Yorkers were skeptical. In the days after the deal was announced, there were a ton of protests. But three months later, the company is abruptly pulling out, chased out by local activists and politicians. How did it go so wrong so fast?
Beme News, 2018, 10:16… Prisoners in Soledad, California are turning to an unlikely source — feminism — to understand the behaviors that may have landed them behind bars. Contessa visits with Richard Edmond Vargas who is working with his fellow inmates to challenge the idea of what it means to “be a man.”
Vice, 2019, 17:00… Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) is an animal liberation group that is notorious for its large-scale actions which sometimes involve illegal tactics such as civil disobedience and trespassing. DxE sees their actions as essential to forwarding their cause of exposing injustices in the Animal Agriculture System.
The Verge, 2017, 3:45… The Academy Awards is an opportunity for Hollywood’s best to speak out about the political causes that concerned them the most, on the biggest stage possible. But in a time when voters are divided and everyone’s a pundit, it’s easy to forget that the Oscars weren’t always a home to politics. From Marlon Brando to the creators of Moonlight, we take a look at the history of the Oscars as a moving, and sometimes miscalculated, home to political protest.
Vice, 2018, 15:13… A new wave of activism by disabled Americans has quickly gained momentum under the Trump administration in response to federal policies they feel are threatening their community on issues ranging from healthcare, to education, to fundamental civil rights. VICE’s Ryan O’Connell, who lives with cerebral palsy, joined hundreds of activists from ADAPT, the largest organizer for disability rights in the U.S., as they staged several days of protest and civil disobedience in Washington D.C.
Broadly, 2018, 10:41… Broadly visits the first adult fat camp that focuses on celebrating bodies instead of changing or shaming them. Women from around the country gathered at Fat Camp in Henderson, North Carolina for a weekend of outdoor activities like swimming, campfires, and pool parties in a judgement-free space. For many of them, the experience among other fat women was a transformative step in their journeys towards self-love.
