The question here wasn’t if the building was going to collapse, but when, and how many workers would be trapped when it did.

Today marks International Workers’ Day, and many marches, actions, and activities around the world as most of the globe’s workers and families celebrate labour and fair rights for workers. (The glaring exception being, of course, the US, which observes a separate Labour Day in September rather than joining in with May Day celebrations.) Tremendous strides have been made in the field of labour rights in the last century, but in other ways, it seems like workers are stuck on a treadmill, unable to progress much further from where they were in 1913, or 1863, for that matter.

The suggestion seemed to be that people hadn’t survived at all, really. They’d just been handed disability as a life sentence.

In the wake of the horrific bombings at the Boston Marathon, media commentary splintered in a thousand different directions in the United States, many of them terrifying and troubling. For example, in a highly racialised culture, speculation about the race and religious affiliation of the suspects began before they’d even been identified. This led eventually to the false identification of an utterly innocent man as people hastened to attribute the crimes to a non-Christian man of colour.

Many people still freely believe that poor people should not be ‘allowed’ to reproduce.

“we feel an urgent need to change how we measure what a successful food system looks like.”

Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of Food Tank, has more street credibility than your average environmental activist. She recently spent two full years on the road, visiting and examining sustainable agricultural practices in 35 countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America. She became intimately familiar with food systems around the world, and penned op-eds for publications like the New York Times and USA Today as dispatches from the field. She has decided to apply her expertise to helping professionals and policymakers throughout the global food system learn from each other.

On the basis of one article, members of the mentally ill community have been tried and found wanting.

In the wake of a horrific series of mass shootings in the United States in 2012, a robust debate has begun about the public policy changes clearly needed to prevent such tragedies; though the debate has, thus far, sidestepped many of the foundational cultural issues at work here. People have been quick to blame the problem on guns, suggesting that eliminating guns will eliminate rampage violence, while others have targeted mental illness, using similarly eliminationist rhetoric.

“When I look at the fossil fuel crisis, when I look at the climate crisis, when I look at the economic crisis, I see opportunities to live better. So I am not afraid of it.”

It no longer seems alarmist to conclude that London burning was a precursor of what is to come elsewhere in the industrialized world, including the United States.

The network appears to think that we are still living in an era when everyone cheerfully crowds around the television at a scheduled time to enjoy a tape delayed broadcast of events that happened twelve hours ago, though, and it seems genuinely shocked that this is not the case.

The Olympics are in full swing in London, and the world is tuning in to watch; and, of course, to indulge the fiction that the Olympics are some kind of great leveling field where nations come together in amity, setting aside politics to compete with integrity and live side by side for a few heady weeks of friendship and solidarity. In the midst of regressive sex testing of female athletes, rising expenses, a scandal over empty seats, aggressive evaluations for doping, and the usual trauma of qualifying and not qualifying, one issue is looming especially large: NBC’s utter failure to handle its Olympics coverage in the United States.

For those who want a little more from their television, there’s something profoundly lacking in the US procedural.

Masterpiece Mystery is airing the latest series of Lewis over the month of July, something which has me tickled pink, because I adore UK police procedurals. Meanwhile, US crime shows continue to leave me cold; I know we’ve got a whole slew of them returning in the fall, and I just can’t be bothered to care all that much. Producers and creative teams in both nations approach procedurals radically differently, and I find the UK version much more to my taste.

This very public fight is a sign of more to come, not just from AMC and Dish but from other content creators and carriers. Such contract disputes may grow more aggressive as networks like Dish struggle with the rise of on-demand streaming and downloads.

Disclosure: I work for the Sundance Channel, an AMC property.

On 1 July, Dish Network subscribers looking for the Sundance Channel, AMC, WE, IFC, and more had to look elsewhere—because an ongoing dispute between parent company AMC Networks and Dish ultimately ended in a contract expiration at midnight on 30 June. The bitter and very public feud dragged on until the last possible moment, but Dish stuck to its position, refusing to renew the contact and continue carrying AMC’s offerings. The two have radically different explanations for the dispute, and both highlight emerging issues in a new media landscape.