Not long after their triumphant The Threepenny Opera (and the not-so-triumphant Wall Street crash of 1929), Bertolt Brecht and his close collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann began assembling Saint Joan of the Stockyards from the spare parts of Happy End, the critically maligned follow-up to Threepenny (both with music by Kurt Weill). The story was heavily influenced by Brecht’s first dip into Marxism, not to mention Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan and Major Barbara. Set in 1920s Chicago, their version of Joan of Arc illustrates, from the workers’ vantage point, a crisis in the meat market brought on by the machinations of one Pierpont Mauler, who treats his laborers even worse than today (see Fast Food Nation). Rising up to oppose him is the sincerer-than-thou Joan Dark, a soup-and-Bible dispenser for the Black Straw Hats, a Christian charity. When Joan's attempts to arbitrate between Mauler and the locked-out workers runs afoul of her superiors in the Straw Hats, she’s cast out among the huddled masses, where she struggles to discern religion’s place in the workers’ battle for justice. (You can probably guess where Brecht thinks it belongs.) more ›

DISCUSSION: Noam Chomsky will be taking questions on US foreign policy tonight, following a screening of Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. Get your questions ready, smartypants. You can watch the video of Pinter's speech here, too. more ›

Valentine's day. We're on the fence. Getting flowers is nice, but we also like getting flowers on the 13th and 15th. Overall there is too much pressure put on the day, on singles and couples alike, and we hate when companies use it to wrangle up the former and pour lemon juice cocktails into their wounded, bleeding, unloved hearts (ahem, Fresh Direct). more ›