In what will be a weekly affair, Jacobin assistant editors Shawn Gude and Alyssa Battistoni will compile their favorite blog posts, essays, and articles from the preceding week. Here’s the first installment.

• Of Ezra Klein, Freddie deBoer writes, don’t hate the player, hate the game.
• “It turns out that when you have more money, you are less likely to be poor.” Matt Bruenig critiques education-enamored liberals and calls for direct poverty eradication.
• Ten years to the month after 2 million Britons marched against the Iraq War, only to see New Labourite Tony Blair go along with George Bush, Laurie Penny reflects on how this repudiation of representative democracy has affected the young Left.
• Robert Schwartz, writing in Labor Notes, contests the conventional wisdom that, for union workers, obtaining and retaining a contract with management is the sine qua non.
• Citing new research, Annie Lowrey of the New York Times reports that all the economic gains from the sluggish recovery are going to the 1%.
• An exhaustive Reuters investigation by Stephanie Simon finds many charter schools erect significant admissions barriers, belying the claim that they’re “open to all.”
• On everyone’s favorite Hallmark holiday, Salon’s Natasha Lennard describes how the state sees love.
• Over at The New Inquiry, Aaron Bady takes on MOOCs, the higher ed ecosystem, and the license to privatize.
• Michael Klare reviews the debate on the Keystone XL pipeline and argues that it really does matter for climate change.
• From the MIA: Hal Draper’s “Two Souls of Socialism”
• And finally, from the 1970s, an interview with Irving Howe.