In a perfectly “free” labor market, everyone theoretically has the right to exchange work for commensurate compensation. But a free market is not necessarily a just one. And when the commodity is sex, how free is too free?

Sex work, and its attendant culture wars, have moved over time from traditional brothels of urban lore to online marketplaces, raising new questions about private and public freedom. In the digital world, how should trust and power be negotiated between provider and client, both encircled by systemic gender and economic inequities?

Call me evil, but I think that holding innocent kids for months and years without charge (and getting off scot-free for it) is far more of a crime than any Twitter exchange.

Beth Murphy’s warm and uplifting documentary Beyond Belief follows two women’s ability to transform the shattering events of 9/11 into a message of hope. Susan Retik and Patti Quigley, upper middle class, pregnant New England soccer moms lost their husbands in 9/11. Introduced by mutual friends, they formed a fast friendship and through their conversations [...]

Private insurers are the scorpion in the story of turtle and the scorpion. They have proven for decades they will do anything to avoid regulation, and will always put profits over the health care needs of regular Americans. Heck, by law, as for-profit corporations, they are required to put profits over everything else. Democrats let insurance companies hop on their back, and now they are smack-dab in the middle of the river with them. Don’t scream when they sting you–it is just their nature.

Speaking in Tongues teaches the advantage of students taking part in an optional immersion programs for Mandarin, Cantonese and Spanish, following four students ranging in age from kindergarten to 8th grade during a year of their studies.

While the media proclaims the end of the Iraq war, we leave behind 1/3 of our forces and a devastated country.

One of the more inane rallying cries of the tea partiers, Obama-haters and conservative wingnuts — and, really, that’s saying something — is that they want “their” country back. Back from what or from whom, well, they never quite say it out loud, or how exactly it is that this country supposedly differs from the one, say, before January 20, 2009, but somehow we’re all both supposed to recognize the difference and give them the benefit of the doubt that the “us” and “them” in their rhetoric isn’t a racial dividing line, despite the fact that the Democratic party predates the Republican party in America by several decades and, despite all their caterwauling, it seems like capitalism indeed remains intact.

Afghan women and children face the worst conditions according to global survey.

Despite the introduction of thousands of new chemicals into the products we use every day, the Toxic Substances Control Act has undergone no revisions since 1976.

Let’s take the very, very long view of America’s decision to make health care available to eight million or more vulnerable and uninsured children. The crude political compromises that led to passage of imperfect health care reform might have obscured a grand achievement: an end to the sacrifice of American children on the altar of [...]