Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
Drones are Paranoid Androids
There is an entire cottage industry of Bush-era movie-making. If a Michael Bay or a Spielberg were to concoct the spectacle of a drone movie, what would it even show?
Heroic tedium and anti-nostalgia
This album doesn't suck
Facebook in the Age of Facebook
How social media help naturalize network-driven capitalism and the sort of flexible, endlessly productive subject it requires
Reading Katehi: The Pepper Spray Chancellor
“our context at the time was seeing what’s happening in the City of Oakland...my fear is a longterm occupation with a number of tents where we have an undergraduate student and a non-affiliate and there’s an incident. And then I’m reporting to a parent that a nonaffiliate has done this unthinkable act with your daughter,
Snake Plissken's Letter to Sallie Mae Student Loan Services
The entirety of your case, which asserts that ‘I now owe a sum of money because I spent what I had borrowed on the terms of an agreement I signed according to which I would repay it’, rests on the mistaken assumption that the five instances of “I” in this sentence correspond to the same
The Conundrum of Body Hair
Body hair contains the threat of embedded masculinity and embedded female maturity—that is, female sexuality—but damn if I see that and don't shave every day anyway.
Obituary: Dick Clark
Wow. Thanks 4 posting this. RT I remember @ScottBaio on AB
Roosevelt, New Jersey, Utopia in Freefall: A Youtube Essay
A Youtube Essay by Jonathan Lethem exploring the rise and fall of a utopian community in Roosevelt, New Jersey.
Tamer Instincts
For circus performers of yesteryear, having a head for business meant having one that could fit in a big cat's mouth.
Lonely Highways in the Land of Jail
What is more confining than vast empty spaces?
A film in the catacinema
The ocean froze. Montage was exciting and vacant. The movement of history was expressed through the three-way cross-cutting of pin stripes, the melting of glaciers, and a dog trying to ride a skateboard. Many workers went on strike and struck out toward the sea. Why should we stay at the factory gates, they sang, if
Concealer: Makeup and Addiction
If lying is part of addiction, can the concealing function of makeup become a crucial part of an addict's lie?
To The Victor
The Pulitzer-winning Stenographer Asks the Poet Laureate For a dance.
Mediums of Exchange
Adapted by imp kerr from Drew Struzan’s Return to OZ poster, 1985 I was on a lunch break from the domestic violence support hotline where…
The Privileged White Men of Treme, and Their Hard Working Others
...however much the show might occasionally be tempted by the jouissance that Davis celebrates and represents -- the overriding imperative to work as little as possible -- the show’s much more powerful rebuke to that perspective comes from the incredible labor that goes into hand-stitching the feathered Indian costumes worn to great effect by Albert
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