video
19 February 2010 | 
“Where does the food in your bodega come from? Who decides whether to stock tortilla chips or salad greens, and how much they’ll cost? How come it’s easier to find fresh fruits and vegetables in Brooklyn Heights than in the South Bronx? What’s the connection between the incidence of diabetes and the food market supply chain?” Bodega Down Bronx is a 30-minute video produced by Jonathan Bogarín, a group of Bronx students and the Center for Urban Pedagogy. Interviewing residents, bodega owners, distributors, politicians, and health professionals, it’s a fantastic, holistic breakdown of the day-to-day realities that flow from public policy, and what you can do about it.
Marxist geographer David Harvey has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume I each year for nearly 40 years. Now his complete course is available online as 13 two-hour video lectures. Watch them online or download the lot as a podcast. davidharvey.org has other excellent audio and video interviews about geography, class, urbanization, neoliberalism and the financial crisis.
A good yarn, beautifully rendered. But like this previously blogged infographic, it focuses on the financial machinery more than the legal chicanery that got us here.
When Design Stopped the War
“But does it work?”
It’s one of those frequently asked questions one often hears at discussions of design and activism. That and the whole preaching to the converted thing. It refers to design specifically, but also protest generally.
It sometimes takes a long time to stop a war, but now and then the impact is immediate. Like the time in February 1998 when protestors disrupted an internationally broadcast “Town Meeting” on Iraq at Ohio State University. Students dropped a NO WAR banner in front of an CNN’s rolling cameras and made such a ruckus that the moderator had to allow them a turn at the mic. Their pointed questions about the war embarrassed the Clinton Administration, tipped public and international support, and prevented an invasion of Iraq. “Not even Ohio supports the bombing, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said a few days later. Why should Egypt?”
Of course, it wasn’t this one protest alone, nor solely the banner smuggled into the event. But the action, broadcast around the world via cable news, sealed the deal. Katha Pollit’s March 1998 article tells the story.
