SURPLUS
Excerpted from Health Communism (2022)
Intentions
An excerpt from On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022)
Your future sex robot
Presumably, most people want to improve their morality because this would benefit others, but is this in fact their primary motivation?
the idea that language is not tuned to the world
The importance of skin area and gender in ticklishness
constipated scorpions
Refreezing Earth's poles feasible and cheap
The Perception of Time in Humans, Brains, and Machines
More Than Half Of All Bitcoin Trades Are Fake
Baby Heists
For the last half century, the international adoption of orphans has been used to cast imperial warfare and extraction as humanitarianism
Six years (and counting) of circlusion
It gives me great pleasure, as well as relief, that The New Inquiry has agreed to republish this landmark essay. For a while now, strangers…
Mall Gothic
White American nostalgia is neurotically fixated on social constructions that are imagined dead even as they become stronger, as evidenced by the twin histories of the mall and the Midwest
Not Feeling It
An interview with Xine Yao on how, and which, feelings are racialized
In the Mood for Loss
How finance facilitated China's authoritarian takeover of Hong Kong
Two time dimensions
Behavioral scientists systematically overestimate how well behavioral science "works"
Can’t See the Wood for the Trees
Are trees worth more standing or chopped down as wood? From Marx’s analysis of wood theft to carbon credit programs, the value of forests as assets continues to shift.
Prefab Freedom
ATV use has soared since the pandemic started. But this new off-roading trend also rehearses familiar myths about the American west and American freedom.
London (Poverty)
Referencing the history of high-end design magazines, Thatcherism, and London’s financialized housing market, Guo looks at the historical conditions which produced her current “world of interiors.”
Organized Plunder
In the absence of the tax dollars city governments rely on, American are now funding themselves by fining the poor instead of taxing the rich.
Bail Bloc 2.0
Our work on immigration, ICE, borders, and detention
Liquid Border
An excerpt from The Law of the Sea by Annalisa Camilli
United States v. Scott Daniel Warren
The criminalization of humanitarian aid at the border enacts a fantasy of desolate individuation. Scott Warren’s felony trial reiterates the necessity to keep reaching out.
Abolish the ICE Prison Complex
A recent Supreme Court decision reminds us that the law has no interest in lifting the veil that covers immigration prisons
Border Theories
What would it look like to put a power structure on trial? Interweaving visual narratives of the Mexico–United States border show the uneasy relation between objects and people.
Soft Borders
The soft patriotic trust in Canada's softly administered border is fully compatible with the logic of restriction.
Fash at Sea
The end of Defend Europe’s fascistic campaign to block migrants’ boats in the Mediterranean doesn’t mean the threat is over
Operation Streamline
The border’s dream is for undocumented immigrants to be its most reliable missionaries. But the immigrant who crosses the border is the affirmation of a life that transcends it.
In the Water
An immigrant in the water is a story or a lesson, but an immigrant on land is our responsibility--they might become our neighbor
Cross-Border Operations
It is no longer plausible to describe the state’s borders as geographically fixed or the state as distinguishable from capital or “markets.”
Empire Records
Guantánamo Diary's missing passages connect it with the US empire's deeper history of far-flung capture and detention networks