Middleboro Review 2: Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it's a workers' party now.

Friday, August 30, 2024

Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it's a workers' party now.

August 30, 2024

Summer's end is upon us, and I am once again, as I have every year since young adolescence, reeling.

The New York Times calls this particular anxiety the "September Scaries." For me, it's always been something of an acute melancholy, a pang of sadness that packs in so much of the existential: transition, the inexorable march of time, anguish over what never got accomplished.

So today, on this very sleepy Friday before Labor Day, I'm wondering how we can ease into fall, a time of cold responsibility and that awful feeling that you've got to get your shambled life in control—or else.

A big part of the solution feels like it rests on our labor. You know, making it so that your job doesn't have you in a chokehold day in and out. Here at Mother Jones, where our bread and butter is the labor beat, we've got a slew of reporting and terrific essays on this very issue: improving working conditions; the power of unions; the politics of a true workers' party; making work suck just a tiny bit less. Not so that every day feels like a vacation, but so that the daily lives of Americans, where so many of us feel the pressures of the grind while never feeling like we're doing enough, can just be lighter.

—Inae Oh

Can American Labor Seize the Moment?

Unions are popular but facing decades of decline. We asked photographers to document this unique moment for the American worker.

BY HAMILTON NOLAN

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Federal court: TikTok may be liable for a 10-year-old's death

BY ABBY VESOULIS

excerpt:

Taiwanna Anderson’s life changed forever in December 2021, when she found her 10-year-old daughter Nylah unconscious, hanging from a purse strap in a bedroom closet.

Barely an adolescent, Nylah wasn’t suicidal. She had merely come across the “Blackout Challenge” in a feed of videos curated her for her by TikTok’s algorithm. The challenge circulating on the video-sharing app encouraged users to choke themselves with household items until they blacked out. When they regained consciousness, they were supposed to then upload their video results for others to replicate. After several days in a hospital’s intensive care unit, Nylah succumbed to her strangulation injuries. Anderson sued TikTok over product liability and negligence that she alleges led to Nylah’s death.

For years, when claimants tried to sue various internet platforms for harms experienced online, the platforms benefited from what amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 statute that offers apps and websites broad immunity from liability for content posted to their sites by third-party users. In 2022, a federal district judge accepted TikTok’s Section 230 defense to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Anderson based on the assessment that TikTok didn’t create the blackout challenge video Nylah saw—a third-party user of TikTok did.

The two states where the GOP is taking on ableist language

BY JULIA MÉTRAUX

These school buses no longer belch pollution. They also give the grid a break.

BY MATT SIMON