Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
The Zentai Project
Three students at the University of Maryland dressed in latex Zentai suits and visited the National Gallery of Art, where they posed in front of (and as) art.
Sunday Reading
Once more, into the brink.
Enigma Deviations
Codebreaker and pioneering computer scientist Alan turing’s life and death illustrate how spies often feel the need to encrypt their personal lives
Beauty Blogosphere 6.22.12
Fifty Shades of Grey makeup, the world's most beautiful women announced at long last, Big Brother helps you choose your outfit, and more.
Yids
Jenna Brager reviews Leela Corman's graphic novel Unterzakhn, mining tenement life and for a Jewish identity without Israel.
Bundle Theory
How modesty survived the custom of sharing beds with all comers remains one of New England's oldest mysteries.
Iranophobia 2.0
One might come to cynically expect the trickle-down discriminatory treatment Iranians (including those with U.S. citizenship, which both Sabet and Jafarzadeh retain) from the government, who views Iran as its number-one enemy. Facing it while picking up an iPhone at the mall is disdain cut from an unexpected cloth.
Violence in ENGL 329: The 19th Century English Novel
The phantom Canadian girlfriend of the Ivies did significantly go on strike, at last, for a week, in a few departments, when bros from Connecticut found their Billy Budd lecture blocked by someone else’s history.
We Were Promised Hot Tubs
Bob Welch and the glories of the lost ideal of 1970s adulthood
Girl Talk
I'm discomfited by my own gendered assumptions about small talk. And where did you get those shoes?
Agents Without Agency
The spylike pursuit of information rather than knowledge makes us function less as thinkers than processors, personal computers — and inefficient, low-powered ones at that. We are not the subjects who know things or intentionally produce knowledge; we are instead means of circulation — objects through which information passes with more or less noise in
The Plague Years
From Bieber videos to gang violence to blog posts, all metaphors point to virus.
Sunday Reading
But what does a honey-bee look like when it GAINS a stinger? Huh, science?
Future legends
Technology doesn't improve productivity so much as intensify ideology
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