The Texas Taliban | A New Ground Zero for Abortion Rights

The North African country is emerging as a key battleground on abortion, with an increasingly assertive movement seeking a break with conservative laws.

It’s midnight and moonless as a group of women gathers outside the Ministry of Health in Rabat, Morocco. They have assembled to wage war on Morocco’s abortion laws, which prohibit abortion in all cases except when the life of the mother is in immediate danger. Their weapon of choice? Sanitary towels covered in fake blood and slogans they affix to the walls of the ministry.

“No uterus — no opinion.”
“My body, my rules.”
“Abortion for all — women decide.”

A security guard in a baseball cap tells them to stop. He gingerly pulls down some of the pads, but the women put them back up, move to another side of the building and paste more on the walls. They’re part of a growing movement that’s relying on an unorthodox mix of tools — eyeball-grabbing public campaigns, Islam’s tenets, political pressure and health documentaries — to demand that Morocco relax its restrictions on abortion. They’re turning Morocco into the latest battleground for abortion rights, which remain limited in several conservative parts of the world, from Alabama to most parts of Africa.

India’s cryptocurrency revolution is being led in earnest by the fame-seeking Akshay Aggarwal.

“Do you want to buy a condom, ma’am? It’s specially designed for women,” Akshay Aggarwal asked passersby near Bryant Street in Palo Alto, California, in 2015. Frustrated by their lack of success, Aggarwal and his team, called the Angels, took a different tack: Sell the condoms to men by saying that it’s good for their partners. As fellows at an entrepreneurship program run by venture capitalist Tim Draper (an early investor in Skype, Tesla, Twitch and others), this next-level pivot was necessary. The Angels sold around 17 condoms in nearly five hours.

Now, Aggarwal, 28, is attempting to sell something else: cryptocurrency. As the Indian government increasingly soured on the idea of a decentralized currency, Aggarwal joined a growing internet movement called India Wants Crypto. He brought with him a 15,000-strong community of blockchain enthusiasts who wanted to participate in saving blockchain’s most popular application.

Greater autonomy is a good thing, but how well do truly democratic workplaces function?

Hierarchies are everywhere, from family-run businesses to multinationals, and under the spotlight as never before. On the plus side, command chains enable control and coordination. They also have many drawbacks, as the British academic John Child highlights in his recently published book, Hierarchy.

Hierarchies, he writes, concentrate rewards at the top, foster secrecy and are, arguably, “a failing organizational principle” for an era in which innovation depends increasingly on ideas created by young tech workers.