And I go to the dormitories-- I'm a valuable potential future customer. They will show me anything I ask to see-- the dormitories are cement cubes, 12 foot by 12 foot. And in that space, there are 13 beds, 14 beds-- I count-- 15 beds. They're stacked up like Jenga puzzle pieces, all the way up to the ceiling. The space between them is so narrow. None of us would actually fit in them. They have to slide into them like coffins.

, there has been an epidemic of suicides at the Foxconn plant.

Because the air in Shenzhen-- it's not good in Hong Kong, but when you get to Shenzhen, you can actually feel it, like a booted foot pressing down on your chest

What I thought is they were made by robots.

I'm a worshiper in the cult of Mac

he made the audience actually feel something about that fact.

I'm not allowed to say.

No one “won” the Second Congo War; it simply collapsed from exhaustion as resources and energy ran out

He was threatened and then thrown out of his job

The soldiers stood with their backs to us, aiming their automatic weapons at the tree line, as the blast from the rotors whipped the tall grass around their legs. As we touched down, jeeps and four-by-fours roared up, bringing injured soldiers for evacuation, goods and gear to ship out, then reloading with arriving people and equipment. Yet children stood a few feet from the soldiers, complaining about the disruption to their soccer game.

. The profits generated when we go shopping flow back down the chain and fuel more assaults on the natural world, drive more people toward enslavement, and feed more goods into the global supply chain. Round and round it goes— our spending drives a criminal perpetual motion machine that eats people and nature like a cancer.

But there’s no secret about the engine driving this vicious cycle. It is us—the consumer culture of the rich north.

pull our cellphones from the earth, our clothing, our computers, our flat-screen televisions, our cars—it all comes from the earth, ultimately.

We think of Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck as the origin of our iPhones, or imagine a local funeral director carving a loved one’s name into a tombstone

Cellphones have become electronic umbilical cords connecting us with our children, our partners, and our parents with an immediacy and reliability hardly known before.

Our view of cemetery monuments is normally restricted to what we see when we bury our loved ones or visit their graves. If we think about where the markers come from at all, we might imagine an elderly craftsman carefully chiseling a name into a polished stone.

a bribe here and there means local police and forest rangers turn a blind eye.

the quarries themselves are illegal, paying no mining permits or taxes.

Just when the family feels they may have finally found some security, they are being locked into hereditary slavery.

See the little girl playing with the hammer?” asked a local investigator. “Along with the child, the size of the hammer grows, and that’s the only progress in her life.

So, like France and many other rich countries, including the United States, Germany imports its tombstones from the developing world.

The markup on tombstones is equally high. The red granite tombstones that sell for $500 to $1,000 in the United States