Spare Change News

Category: TV & Movies

  • Corporations Are Not People

    Election Day is right around the corner, but many voters in Massachusetts are unaware that their ballot will include a question about amending the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s discredited decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C. The question asks voters whether they support a constitutional amendment that would affirm that 1) corporations do…

  • Memo To Animal Lovers

    Of the millions of hackneyed expressions, “you are what you eat” proves to be a double entendre with serious ethical implications. In the past few decades, the meat industry has been insidiously transformed into an entity with unrecognizable semblance to its former self as the practice of factory farming has infected our nation’s system of…

  • A Review of Herman’s House by Angad Bhalla

    Solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary is among the most desperate and forlorn places on Earth. The prison—better known by its nickname, “Angola”—is the largest maximum-security prison in the country, with 5000 inmates. It is a place largely indistinguishable from the slave plantation it once was—a place where sexual slavery and rape are endemic,…

  • Op-Ed

    As of September 1st, the state of Massachusetts has revised the conditions for Emergency Assistance, in particular, eligibility for shelter. Homeless patrons may now only enter a shelter if they have lost their home through natural forces, no-fault eviction, fleeing from domestic violence, or unsafe habitation for their children. I am writing today, not to…

  • Meeting My Father For the First TIme, Again

    A gentleman and I recently had a brief conversation about an article I had written for Mother’s Day. He congratulated me on the article, and suggested I write one on behalf of Fathers. Upon hearing the mere suggestion of paying homage to fathers, I experienced a barrage of emotions. I felt anger, sorrow, hurt and…

  • Fathering: A Short Story

    When I was asked to write something about my father, I first thought to myself, “That will be a short story.” See, there isn’t much I can tell you about my old man because I never really knew him. I don’t remember him as a child, and I only saw him once or twice when…

  • Orwell's Economy

    The Price of Inequality, by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Norton & Company). While reading The Price of Inequality, one seems confronted by a society that was merely imaginative in Jack London’s 1908 dystopian novel The Iron Heel. Rampant poverty, political and economic imbalance, entrenched class divisions, and middle class evaporation, all engendered by an oligarchic…

  • Strike Up the Chorus

    “Who wants to read a poem?” Saul Williams asked the audience. The crowd gathered at the Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass., was small, just a couple hundred people, but it appeared to be made up of devout fans. Many people clutched dog-eared copies of Williams’ books of poetry to their chests. The audience froze…

  • A Founder's Reflections

    All my life, heroes, both real and imagined, have influenced me from books, movies, television and music. Even those whom I have met in person, and, yes, even those costume ones from comics (no, I have no desire to run across rooftops, though that may be fun). Though I don’t consider myself a hero like…

  • Art & Revolution: Ai Weiwei Reviewed

    Edward Said describes the intellectual “as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power.” Alison Klaymen’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry shows us what that looks like in practice. Her documentary follows the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei as he and his team prepare for exhibitions in Munich and London;…