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Party Down: Charmingly Low-Budget Workplace Satire From the Makers of Veronica Mars

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen The Guardian
The show never leaves the workplace. The complexities of these characters’ lives and relationships are teased out within the confines of their job, blurring the boundaries between personal and professional to create an almost claustrophobic intimacy. It’s also strangely prescient of the current, increasingly precarious gig economy.

The Unfulfilled Promise

Robert Greene II The Nation
Peniel Joseph’s history of the three Reconstructions.

The Great Slave Strike That Helped End Slavery

Mark A. Lause Jacobin
Today, on Presidents’ Day, we rightly celebrate Abraham Lincoln for helping end slavery. But we shouldn’t forget the unstoppable force that also brought down the Slave Power: the several million slaves who left the plantation, many of whom joined the Union Army.

Breaking Up (With China) Is Hard To Do

Robert Kuttner The American Prospect
In the absence of more attention to the supply chain, the U.S. is becoming even more reliant on Beijing—and ‘friendshoring’ often increases that dependence.

Lessons From Majid Khan’s Release From Guantánamo

David Rosen The Progressive
An interview with the attorney for the former al Qaeda operative, who testified to the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ and more torture at the prison camp. That torture was a war crime that should have been—and should in the future be—prosecuted as a criminal act.

History Lessons for Antifascists

Helmut-Harry Loewen CounterPunch
A study of strategies that have shaped antifascist mobilizations over the past century, offers lessons for thinking about an “effective and long-term response to the loose coalition of forces that we saw at the Capitol … [an] entanglement that we will continue to see in the coming weeks and months.”