Political Currency
...economics rests on the historicity of the tale—it gets the nature of money wrong. In Desan’s version of the chartalist view, money arises out of taxation. A central authority with...
Nobody Knows You're a Drone
...is especially ironic. But the Army’s version is much scarier than Medusa and her less famous sisters. There is no avoiding eye contact with these drones. The flying machine holds...
Skin Feeling
...A paranoid version of a pretty jail with a beast that won’t die at its heart. Well yes, I know, I’m in it up to my ears. I’m in it...
Six years (and counting) of circlusion
...for children, excerpted in The New Inquiry). Almost immediately, I began an English-language version of “Come On,” working in a Google Doc in conversation with Bini. We eventually published the...
The Myth of Liberal Policing
For liberals, police reform is always a question of helping police sustain their legitimacy, despite their illegitimate roots
Fame Shame
...me that these circles — mine and Dunham’s — so often seem to reproduce the very power structures we claim to abhor: We glorify some people at the expense of...
Lockdown
...came to power, the media has increasingly come under the state’s stranglehold. Dissenting journalists have been attacked and even murdered by Hindu nationalists. Government spending for advertisements – a major...
Class Consciousness for American Doctors
Professionalism is the ideological terrain on which medicine’s culture interacts with its class politics
Powers of the Bottom
...years, my primary reservation being that certain expressions and modes of violence may only serve to reinforce techniques of state power. If nothing else, there is simply no comparing the...
The Slow Politics of Occupied Filmmaking
...to ourselves, but to culture as a whole. The power of the pepper spray video clip to affect the material situation is undeniable, though the process by which it occurs...
The White Man’s Boredom
Governing empire was deadening to its administrators, and lethal to its victims
The Black and Blue Line
...accorded rights even when the victor’s superiority in power is complete.” The very act of drawing borders is the “primal phenomenon of all violence.” Benjamin shows us that the constitution...
Writing Like a Partisan
Forbidden Notebook by Alba De Céspedes offers insight into contemporary Italian fascism
The World According to Modern Monetary Theory
...the people, money can be used to serve the common good. If people lack formal political power, more democratic layers of sovereignty may be possible in the shadow of the...
White Magic
Though it is the subtext of savagery that animates narratives around witches, white women who take up the mantle of witch magic rarely understand themselves to be engaging in Indian or savage play
Power and the Pickup Artist
...for the women who choose to play along with them, the pickup artists do seem to cede power rather than amass it, denying themselves the opportunity to be the subject...