Housing Crisis in the “Garden City of the East”
Sri Lanka's history of social housing offers models and warnings to the rest of the world.
Hearing Like an LRAD: When Violence is Speech and Speech is Violence
To ask the question of whether an LRAD is designed to hurt people or designed to communicate across long distances with people is to mystify its central design function: it is a technology whose purpose is to FORCE you to listen and obey, and one which is less interested in the difference than you'd think.
An old man and an older woman battle to the death in an ancient manner
she probably told Gilgamesh he’d get fat off all those loaves of bread, probably sucker punched Jesus, replaced Roland’s horn with a protophonograph that split his temples from sheer sonic distress, told Vlad the Impaler that his methods were obsolescent, flooded Paris a few times for a laugh
Jar-Jar Jesus
The Phantom Menace is George Lucas's updated mythos for a cynical consumerist age — magical thinking without magic.
"She Was 25 and Curvaceous": The Death of Lorena Xtravaganza
If the New York Times can get away with describing a trans woman as "25 and curvaceous" in the first line of the piece covering her death, that means it only stopped describing all women in those terms because they “had” to.
Belles Lettres
The extent to which the looks of women writers figures in appraisals of their skill indicates how thoroughly gendered the notion of “genius” remains
Class Dismissed
"Lordlings marry ballet girls, but ladies rarely put their hearts and fortune at the feet of the Lion Comique."
My Own Private Beauty Myth
A number of things I once believed to be true about my appearance: I have strong features, I am big-boned, my skin is both very…
Sunday Reading
Time is an illusion. Sunday, doubly so.
New Transcendentalist
Marilynne Robinson's essay collection is about the role of the critic in helping us to remember, to not forget, our potential as humans.
Five Questions with Eileen Myles
Genres for me are just a way in which we are controlled, protected I suppose but I'm not a writer to be protected at all.
Beauty Blogosphere 5.11.12
The legacy of Vidal Sassoon, pore-zapping superheroes, and Oliver Cromwell's body lotion collection.
Un(der)seen Cinema: Europa 2005
http://youtu.be/EGU06JQ92lc The last film Danièle Huillet saw released in her lifetime (with three others finished posthumously) is one of Straub-Huillet’s most cinematically formal and politically…
Troubled Mime
One of Paris's most cherished performers, Jean-Gaspard Deburau came to regard his fame as an invisible box out of which he could not climb.
The Unfuckables
Comedians like Tina Fey pretend to be plain to avoid the trap of being dismissed as being too pretty to be funny. This can spill over into a slut-shaming tendency that belies their faux feminism
What part of NO don’t you understand?
The book of shadows. They live in shadows.
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