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.
Revenge of the Thanatoids
The collection Work may be a great wonder of a thing, but one’s wondering begins with the odd sense of having been served a dish of leftovers.
The Noonday Shadow
First, they are run you over, then they insist on not polishing their ornament. Such is the ultimate sign of luxury: to have a $320,000 ornament, supported by a mass of ramming weight and speed, and to let it get rusty.
Meritocracy and measurement myths
A quantified self is not a self better understood but a self reduced to fit the yardstick.
Trash past death
there’s no such thing as a happy hope. it’s all a giant wheel of disenchantment, of sadness, of disorder. you wait and you’re cursed.
The Jimmy McNulty Gambit: Mike Daisey and the Thickening Crust of Our Awareness
...if truth and fiction are not black and white – and they are not – then it is simply not enough to condemn Mike Daisey for lying...
Lest on sorrow we should sup...
"Care's a canker that benumbs...."
Stalker/Zona
Geoff Dyer's book about a movie about a journey to a room. But if Dyer is Stalker, then the reader becomes Writer, who can do whatever he wants with the text.
The Transcendence of the Makeover
Makeovers are a key plot point in many a young adult book. So why don't more of them focus on the end goal of the makeover—transcendence?
Sunday Reading
Meanwhile, on the internet.
Curb Your Moralia
He critiqued the television medium, but could Adorno have seen Larry David coming?
The Headless Gentleman
The face, a limb, or a particular sense functions analogically to impede another’s cognition or premonition of interiority or humanity.
Beauty Blogosphere 3.16.12
Links roundup: Rod Blagojevich's prison 'do, eye-gazing parties, chess dress codes, and why green M&Ms make you horny.
Seeing and Nothingness
Some people watch what they eat. The narrator of one obscure French novel would rather watch than eat.
Beyond the Valley of 1984
Miles Klee’s inventive, chaotic debut novel Ivyland gets stranded between dystopia and the apocalypse
Five Questions with Ammiel Alcalay
I remain deeply involved in cartoons.
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