Coworking space in Hancock, Michigan. Photo credit: Sarah Bird

CityLab 
How Rural America is Saving Itself

By Jean Hardy, U-M School of Information

Rural regions dominate the American landscape, comprising 97 percent of the country’s land mass. While 20 percent of Americans live in these regions, many still doubt their importance in the 21st century. A new wave of commentary and reports have tackled a question on many urban Americans’ minds: can rural America be “saved”? One of these, a New York Times op-ed by Eduardo Porter, went as far as to say, “one thing seems clear...nobody—not experts or policymakers or people in these communities—seems to know quite how to pick rural America up.” With stagnant or declining populations in many rural counties, and “superstar cities” hogging most of the economic growth, Porter’s view would have us believe that rural life is fading away... Read more here.

S. Molldrem

The Fight Magazine
Big Tech's War on Sex: The deplatforming of sexuality and how to resist it

By Stephen Molldrem, American Culture

On December 17th, Tumblr—a social network notorious and celebrated for the many varieties of niche pornography and kinky communities that it once hosted on its servers and allowed to flourish on its playful interface – made its first major move to effectively purge sexual media from its platform. This followed a December 3rd announcement from the firm (owned by a subsidiary of Verizon) that the social network would ban all “adult content.”... Read more here.