Seminar, which opened on Broadway in November, depicts a creative writing class led by a gruff Alan Rickman. “Unlike ordinary workshop teachers, he does not require the students’ work to be circulated beforehand and instead reads it on the spot,” writes Jeffrey J. Williams. “But it doesn’t really matter whether Leonard reads the stories; it matters whether he can hook them up. He delivers what he’s paid for, not as a teacher but as a consultant.” (Photo by Benjamin Solah, via Flickr creative commons)

“It is time for supporters of labor to try an approach to reforming labor laws that does not involve a national conversation on the pros and cons of procedures like ‘card-check’....and instead focuses on the fact that labor organizing is a civil right,” write Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit. “[J]ust as it is now illegal to fire or discipline someone for race or gender or national origin or religion, it would be illegal under the Civil Rights Act to fire or discipline someone for trying to organize or join a union.” (Photo: ILGWU photo archive, via Flickr creative commons)

Dissent presents Rafia Zakaria’s Pakistan Diary, on the lives of women in Karachi. “The mosques in the city, sometimes more than one on a single city block, are festooned with lights on their domed outsides. The inside, to me and to almost all the women at the airport, rich or poor or thin or fat or veiled or unveiled, is a mystery. Women do not go inside mosques in Pakistan; they pray at home.” (Photo: girls at a school in Karachi; UN Photo, via Flickr creative commons)

"Gambling is dice, not scratch cards; work is shoveling, not shelf-stacking; and the rallying call in 'Death to My Hometown' is solely directed at the 'boys,'" writes Natasha Lewis. "The world in Bruce Springsteen's new album, Wrecking Ball, is archaic and unreal....Even so, there is something to be said for the Boss's project. He unashamedly asserts the moral worth of those political values - freedom, justice, and cooperation - that should form the basis of any fight back."

“Mare Island was the oldest naval base on the West Coast until its closure in 1996,” writes James Thomas Snyder. “I have been surprised to find this detail missing from recent reporting about Vallejo. When Mare Island closed, 25,000 jobs disappeared and $500 million in annual income evaporated from the community....[T]he federal government was Vallejo’s economic dynamo. The city never really recovered.” (Photo: Mare Island, by eeetthaannn, 2009, via Flickr creative commons)

“To the chagrin of many progressives, a number of scholars and public officials claim that [Frederick] Douglass’s political philosophy ‘lives on’ in the ideas of contemporary conservatives,” writes Nicholas Buccola. But while his rhetoric was “sometimes individualist,” it “was always coupled with sensitivity to circumstances. In certain contexts, he believed, a simple pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy was woefully inadequate.” (Photo: Douglass c. 1866, Collection of the New York Historical Society, via Wikimedia Commons)

Phillip M. Richards decided to teach for a year in France to confront the realities of race and higher education in the United States "in a less mystified academic and intellectual world." But at L'Université Stendhal, the real meaning of the word Francophonie became clear: "it was the colonial French world deployed around a cosmopolitan French center." (Photo: Stendhal University, by Osbornb via Flickr creative commons)

Rakim Brooks interviews Charles E. Cobb, Jr., a former field organizer for SNCC. “We did the patient, even boring, day-to-day work of sitting on porches talking to people amid a lot of fear....You had to sit down and talk to people, give them a chance to judge you, to know you, because they were going to be putting their lives, their jobs, and their families at risk....This raises one of the weaknesses of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The best protection against being absorbed by the establishment against one’s will is deep roots in the community.” (Photo: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation at the 1964 DNC; LoC, Wiki Com)

The Indignados of Spain, whose movement has “nothing to do with traditional strikes and union marches, or ordinary political demonstrations,” “left more than a few thinkers out of conceptual gas,” writes Baptist Brossard. “Once we admit, however, the Indignados’s attention to the maintenance of internal discipline...their inscription in local communities...and the way they set out to have rational discussions, we end up pretty far from the usual clichés about the Left.” (Photo: Indignado assembly, by M. Martin Vicente, 2011, via Flickr cc)

Is the Black Bloc a “cancer” on Occupy, as Chris Hedges recently put it? “[A]s encampment after encampment is dismantled,” writes Bhaskar Sunkara, “reaching new constituents and getting more people actively involved will be more important than ever....But we don’t need to excise people from Occupy, we just need to grow it. And I remain unconvinced that anarchists are in any significant way preventing this growth, though they are a convenient scapegoat for more fundamental failings.” (Photo by Florian Bausch, 2011, via Wikimedia Commons)

Japan had planned to increase its nuclear power production from 30 to 50 percent of domestic power over the next thirty years. “That plan has gone with the radioactive wind,” writes Ari Phillips. “There’s no easy route out of the energy fix in Japan, let alone the global crisis of climate change....At [the Institute for Global Environmental Strategy] researchers are working feverishly to address these challenges domestically, while onlookers await the course of action Japan will pursue as it emerges from this tumultuous period.” (Photo: IGES building in Hayama, Japan, courtesy of the author)

“[N]owhere can the impact of the Occupy insurgency be better seen than in the fumbling efforts of Romney’s GOP rivals to capture the new anti-corporate sentiment,” writes Peter Dreier. “The Republicans are trying to figure out how to tap into the national mood without sounding too anti-business and offending their corporate sponsors. They’re finding that it’s a difficult tightrope to walk.” (Photo by David Shankbone, 2011, via Flickr creative commons)

Franklin Strier argues that the Roberts Court’s Hosanna-Tabor decision last week fits into a broader pattern of expanding the authority of religious institutions. “While the Court can superficially dilute its activism by characterizing these de facto overrules as distinctions, it cannot change its results-orientation. Results speak for themselves.” (Image via noclip at Wikimedia Commons, 2008)

Ever since Muncie was christened “Middletown” in 1929, “journalists, academics, and presidential hopefuls have flocked to this blue-collar city in eastern Indiana, for a look into the petri dish of American life or simply some Joe-the-Plumber-style street cred,” writes Max Fraser. But “the very idea of Middletown now seemed a pale shadow of present realities, as the stark prose of unemployment statistics and eviction notices inscribed a very different kind of story onto the lives of millions of Americans.” (Image: abandoned factory in Muncie, IN; sungo, Flickr creative commons, 2009)

“The real divide in Europe now,” writes Jeremiah Riemer, is “about the political culture of regulation and crisis management. It’s a minor fissure across the Rhine, between the different administrative styles at loggerheads in the Franco-German duo that dominates the eurozone. The gap is larger between the northern countries, which have independent civil services and ‘clean government’... and the southern countries, where patronage and tax evasion are traditional and widespread.” (Image: Sebastian Zwez, 2009, Wikimedia Commons)

Atossa Abrahamian on the Freelancers Union: “[H]ow does one organize a workforce that is, by definition, unaffiliated? Where do you find members, if not in assembly lines or hiring halls? How do you hold your employers accountable and make yourself visible to government when you cannot strike? And isn’t a freelancers’ union, in all its individualistic self-organization, the ultimate oxymoron?” (Joel Washing, Flickr creative commons, 2007)

Matt Pearce spent ten days on Tahrir Square, leading up to Egypt's first election since the January revolution. “It seemed that Tahrir was not actually the beating, democratic heart at the center of the country, but a kind of recurring dream whose symbols and figures were losing their mystique for Egyptians over time.” (Photo courtesy of the author.)

Jake Blumgart interviews Balázs Nagy-Navarro, who has been leading a hunger strike by members of the media in protest of Hungary's new restrictions on press freedom. “They put down a rope with a sound box and it plays the same three songs, all day long....[W]e realized it was music just to annoy, just to disturb us. At first it was just on the news desk balcony. But now they have put it in a closed box and they have two guys almost guarding it. They said it was under the instruction of the CEO of the company. You can now understand the reality of the absurd tragicomedy that is going on here.”

What's happening in Wukan? Jeffrey Wasserstrom interviews Rachel Beitare, a journalist on the ground in the Chinese town in revolt. “[T]he village’s situation encapsulates almost all of the big issues that trouble Chinese society: rural poverty vs. rapid development, unchecked power, growing economic gaps, environmental degradation, corruption, official violence, the balance of power between Beijing and the provinces—it’s all there.” (Photo by Helen Lee, via Google Plus)

“In the border regions of Sudan,” writes Eric Reeves, “we are witnessing a ghastly reprise of the conduct that has defined Khartoum’s brutal military control of its restless peripheries for decades.... [J]ust as the regime has turned Darfur into a ‘black box,’ from which no honest accounts can emerge, so too has it drawn a veil over its actions in Blue Nile, South Kordofan, and Abyei.” (Image: UN photo of Abyei after northern attack, Flickr cc)