Editor's Note

Year's end.This issue arrives at the darkest time of the year.Universities have shut their doors for the holidays, students return home, workers take time off and families congregate.Or so goes the Dickensian bourgeois mythology.Of course we know capitalism never really goes to sleep, and that December is when consumer culture reaches its fever pitch, even as the news cycle turns down the dial on "hard news" towards human interest, lifestyle and entertainment coverage.Amid heightened political interference and censorship of not only commercial media and journalism, but of scientific and social scientific research, the arts and education, seasonal "soft news" exacerbates the algorithmic suppression of critical thought and public engagement with the reality of ongoing massacres in Sudan, the DRC, floods and orchestrated famine in occupied Palestine, bombing campaigns conducted during a socalled "ceasefire," and so much more-another way of mitigating culpability and accountability, another way of turning away.