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It seems that, regardless of age, economic status or political beliefs, everyone is apprehensive about the future. Renowned author, filmmaker and organizer Astra Taylor captures the zeitgeist of our times in “The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart,” published last year. Taylor explores the pervasive sense of dread that defines modern life,
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Imagine in the span of a year being badly injured in a car accident, suffering the loss of family members and discovering you are pregnant. After this happened to one Philadelphia woman, she was told she had been accepted into a study of how guaranteed income impacts quality of life. The gift of $500 a
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Say you’re renovating your kitchen. You weigh the pros and cons of granite versus butcher block countertops, you compare different brands of convection stoves and you work through stacks of tile samples for the backsplash. You’re thinking mostly about style and function, and perhaps the sustainability of the materials, but how about slavery? Surely you
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When was the last time you got lost in Home Depot, or cursed the amount of time it took to walk from one side of Walmart to the other as you checked off the items on your shopping list? The term “big box” captures their shape, but possibly understates their scale. A Walmart Supercenter and
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On May 8, the City of Philadelphia cleared a homeless encampment that stretched two blocks on Kensington Avenue between East Allegheny Avenue and Orleans Street under the Market-Frankford Line. This clearing marked the first step of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s five-phase plan to dramatically improve Kensington, whose residents contend with extreme poverty, open-air drug markets and
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What’s the size of a toaster and uses three times the energy of an average Pennsylvania household? That would be a cryptocurrency mining machine — a computer that runs 24/7 and spits out numbers in an attempt to solve complex problems, creating proof-of-work cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, as a result. “We have companies that have 80,000
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It was a warm summer morning and shirtless, sweaty runners were just coming off the Wissahickon Trail. As they ascended out of the picturesque valley in Northwest Philadelphia to start the workday, a woman named Mary and two companions were heading the other direction, already getting down to business. Their mission looked a little like
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Remember Andrew Yang from the 2020 presidential debates? The current election cycle has been so frightening that you could be excused for forgetting the crowded Democratic primary stages of 2020, but Yang gained some headlines for backing a universal basic income (UBI) proposal he called the Freedom Dividend. Under his proposal, every American adult would
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Is capitalism inherently rotten, or do we just let it go too far? It can be hard for Americans to think critically about capitalism. If you want to know what water is like, don’t ask the fish, the proverb goes. Capitalism is the water we drink, the air we breathe. It is our state religion.
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