Joshua Eaton
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"Poverty"
ALA’A SHEHABI is not a woman to be trifled with. Born in the U.K., she earned a Ph.D. from Imperial College London and has worked for prestigious institutions like Rand Europe and the Bahrain Institute for Banking and Finance.
At the same time, Shehabi has been active in Bahrain’s ongoing uprising. She was at Pearl [...]
“THE NAME ‘BAHRAIN’ means ‘two seas,’” our tour guide explained as we walked away from the old Portuguese fort on the outskirts of Manama. “There’s the saltwater sea that surrounds Bahrain. Then there’s the fresh water that bubbles up in the middle of the sea to our north.”
The fort itself is breathtaking, set [...]
WHEN I SHOWED UP, the room at Harvard Divinity School was already overflowing. World-renowned professors and undergrads alike were packing the aisles, standing in the doorways, and squeezing in behind furniture. At the front of the room stood Bhikkhu Bodhi—a short, soft-spoken Buddhist monk with a marked Brooklyn accent—who held the audience rapt even as [...]
I SPENT THE YEAR AFTER COLLEGE in an AmeriCorps program that placed me in the Task Force for the Homeless in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. During my time there I served at several different transitional homes, emergency shelters, and soup kitchens. It was the end of a string of social-service work for me, which started several [...]
ON September 17 Mother Jones released secret video taken at a Romney fundraiser. In one of the most widely-publicized quotes from the video, Romney discusses the 47 percent of Americans who, either through deductions or low income, pay no income taxes:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the [...]
IN HONOR of Labor Day, which was this past Monday, I’ve decided to post a collection of Buddhist teachings on worker rights I put together last year.
Quotes from the Buddha
Our first quote from the Buddha (c. 400 – 486 BCE) is found in the Kutadanta sutta (Digha nikaya 5), a major text for [...]
MY FRIEND and fellow Occupy Boston alumnus Farhad Ebrahimi (@yahktoe)—who's also a pretty amazing environmental funder—recently visited a community affected by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Later he posted a really moving set of tweets about the things he saw and the people he talked to. I defy anyone to read them and not [...]
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LAST week I tweeted about unpaid internships, free blogging, and the general idea that people in creative or social service jobs should work for the love of what their doing rather than (not in addition to) decent pay and benefits. My tweets got a really great response and generated a lot of really interesting conversation. [...]
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I JUST posted a Twitter thread where I talk about my personal struggles with student and credit card debt—and asked others to share their stories. Below are some responses from people who took up that challenge:
@joshua_eaton You are 100% correct.My neighbors were foreclosed and moved out in the middle of the [...]
LAST week I came out to my 1000 some-odd Twitter followers as a delinquent debtor. I’m not really that delinquent—I’m two weeks behind in one credit card payment—but it’s still extremely personal. And I still had to build up a lot of courage to do it.
There are two main points I was trying to [...]
