Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
❒ she ❒ i ✔ haze
because he knows yesterday will never come back
Rail Ambition
Engineers and bureaucrats trained their sights on bringing premier transport to the Balkans -- and what they achieved left all other systems at the station.
Dr. Mabuse Dispassionately Recites Communist Theory Over Found Footage of Riots @ The Whitney Sunday May 6
A bodiless treatise on narration, bored speakers, audience misbehaviour and police megaphones, but: is anybody listening? Here’s Evan’s proposal: “A bodiless treatise from a criminal…
Blogging the Caine Prize 2012
On May 1st, the short list for the "Caine Prize for African Writing" was released, and like last year, I and a group of intrepid bloggers will read and blog about the five stories in the next month and a half (schedule TBD). If you are a blogger, and also if you are not, join
the junction of a tricycle & a hammer under a busted gambling table
A cheer arose. Somehow they had gotten the entire dome of the Madonna dell’Orto off intact. A true feat of uncivil engineering, and they rolled it through the streets as though they had decapitated a giant. Onto the rubbish mound it went.
May Day 2012
Reports from May Day 2012 from Kansas City to Athens.
Presumed conspicuous
Social media make conspicuous consumption worse
What are you going to do, tear down half the city
Well, watch out. One of these days you'll turn on the tap, and blood will run out...
The Albatross Around Johnny Depp's Brain
"WTF. He's got a crow in his hair. If you haven't seen the picture, google it. He's got an actual crow, a crow, a bird, a crow, a crow, a bird, in his hair, he's got a crow, a bird. He's got a bird just chilling out. He's got a crow, an actual crow..."
It is out of the deadliest struggles that we get the noblest characters...
"There is no love sincerer than the love of food..."
Anatomy of a Dissection
A few months ago, I dissected a squid. The squid was unsurprisingly strange: all tentacles and ooze and sets of sharp hidden teeth. But the dissection was strange, too.
Avoid All Demonstrations as a Precaution
In lieu of alerts warning students from recently bombed or attacked sites in Baghdad and Kandahar or ongoing protests in Kuala Lumpur, the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) just issued students a detailed alert about upcoming U.S.-based May Day general strike actions.
Sunday Reading
Sunday rhymes with Zungu, especially on Zaturday.
Thinking bad
Mark Dery's I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts captures the tone of pre-Internet ranting
That sisterhood. In that one life. Destroy one another.
physical evidence is the only kind of proof, witnesses are unreliable, documents can lie.
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