- From the Editors: Coal-Getting
As Orwell reminds us, "revolution as much as reaction needs coal;" the business of laboring is not circumscribed by wages, but is the requisite input for which wages, profit, knowledge, and societies are the outputs. Business, thus conceived, is the business of us all—and yet too often we forget to remember its workers, whose numbers comprise ourselves, without whose work nothing is gotten.
- Setting the Rules: Dean Baker in conversation with The Straddler
We had the greatest downturn since the Great Depression, and the amount of additional regulatory restraints on business as a result of the Obama administration's actions were pretty piddling. Even the health care act—the insurance industry is basically fine with it.- Treatment: Fiction by Peter Davis
"Greatness," Yeatsman was saying to me, "once resided in the throne, the church, the academy, the sword. Now it lives in the flashbulb. The flashbulb and the movie camera make hostages of us all, destroying identity and replacing it with celebrity. That's the machine that cranks and hums here, and we're the oil for it."
- The Straddler on Stage: Trousers by Dan Monaco
"What a blessing, then, to own trousers which fit properly!"
- What's Natural? Peter Temin in Conversation with The Straddler
In my opinion, macroeconomics has lost its way. The kind of models that many people use—general equilibrium models—start from assumptions of perfect competition, omniscient consumers, and various like things which give rise to an efficient economy. As far as I know, there has never been an economy that actually looked like that.
- Union by Design: Art by Atosha McCaw
As a designer in a trade union, one inherits a strong visual tradition. The simple ideals and messages of modern unionization have barely changed in the last 200 years. So the challenge is to work out a way of presenting the same ideas in new ways. Union design turns out to be more conceptually based than are other forms of graphic design. There are no fists or flags in my work, although I'm asked for them quite regularly.
- Poetry by Katherine Holmes, Quinn White, and Leonard Gontarek
- The Cerebral Variety Circus
A recap of our first-ever multidisciplinary live performance.
- Words have Always Taken Over:
Foraging Among the Memories of Sylvia Plath by Sarah Schwartz
[Plath] revises towards singularity and generalization. She revises towards a prose that she believes will be able to communicate to a public, to perform a community. But the community I have found in Plath and her readers is a community of those who find themselves outside, alone.
- The Straddler Review:
Nothing's Been Authenticated: The Double Hustle of Rick Ross
by Marty Brown
Rick Ross has done something that the Beastie Boys could not: By charging in two directions at once—towards authenticity and artifice—he has smuggled duality into the rap marketplace. Ross is running a double hustle. He's hustling those who believe in his overt persona by convincing them that he's a drug dealer. He's also hustling those who recognize his phoniness, and it's this second hustle that's more intricate. What does he gain by calling attention to the hustle itself? He gains admiration for his hustling, and that, in turn, validates his hustling. By pretending to be a hustler, he actually becomes one.