Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
Curls and the Patriarchy
Bob Schieffer, Candy Crowley, and obedience.
Built to Last
For the architectural photographer Jamie McGregor Smith, the twenty-two buildings left over from the 2004 Athens Olympics have become modern relics, reminding us of Greece's economic crisis as well as the cost of national pride.
Silten wares
The assembly line / It coughed And Thick was / The resultant silt It huffed / The silt thick And The trucks /…
Cultural Medium (Rare)
The anthropological minimum is pink on the inside
Biopolitical Exclusion Starts with a Hug
Where class itself becomes a scientifically-legitimated predictor for social pathologies, it can also become a variable to deny these underclass subjects opportunity to that world.
Loving the Alien
The mainstreaming of electronic dance music and the assimilation of non-Western music into hipster taste hierarchies owes more to biopolitics than beats
Emotional Work and Cultural Capital à Deux
In a world where women have long been seen as creatures of beauty—and, just as importantly, where both women and men are increasingly being surveyed through social media—women’s longstanding expertise in presentation becomes a form of cultural capital for a pair of lovebirds.
With the pathos of uplift characteristic of the Progressive era, the nickelodeon was hailed (or condemned for not fulfilling its proper function) as ‘democracy’s theater’,…
Sunday Reading
"I walked down alone Sunday after church / To the place where John has been cutting trees." -- Robert Frost, "Pea Brush"
World Melodrama: Nobody's Children, 1950
“It’s needlessly cruel.” Watching Nobody's Children is something like watching four people drive a car to the edge of a cliff, get out, and push…
Forging North-South (Neck)Ties
In 1978 American artist Jeffrey Vallance sent one of his ties to dozens of government leaders with the request that they send back one of their own. By 1979, at least 47 had complied (though Pope John Paul II opted to send back a medal and an autographed picture).
TNI Vol. 10 release @ KGB Bar 10/30
Join us for True Story at the famous KGB Bar on Tuesday, October 30 for a communal reading event to celebrate the gossip-themed issue release…
The Oceanic Feeling
Channel Orange isn’t Frank Ocean’s coming out. It’s a tidal wave crashing down
Real Inauthentic Like
In her 2008 essay on the novel's future, Zadie Smith outlined two possible paths for the form. With her most recent novel NW, she has opened a third
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