Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
The Fame Game
Frank Warren of PostSecret and Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen discuss the instability of sudden Internet celebrity.
Night Moves
There was a time when late-night wakefulness wasn't something to be dreaded but welcomed. Centuries ago, sleepers woke with pleasure, even eagerness. Between "first" and "second" sleep, so called, men, women and children stirred to enjoy activities domestic and romantic, spiritual and intellectual.
Thoughts on a Word: Nappy
Not everyone can say "nappy" and come away unscathed. Say it to, or even just near, the wrong person and it might just blow up in your face.
Northanger Abbey and antisocial pleasure
Northanger Abbey wants to condemn consumerism and champion the right kind of novel reading, but it can find no stable premises for the distinction
Portrait of the Artist as a Rookie Cop
The photographs of Antonio Bolfo, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate and former NYPD patrolman who took artistic photographs while on the job, humanize both officers and civilians. So says the The New York Times. But is this true? And if it is, does it matter?
Look What You Did, You Little Jerk
Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and culture's problem with bad mothers
Best in Show
I don’t particularly like dogs, at least not as a species. Some of them are perfectly lovely creatures I’m happy to share space with on…
The Earnestness of Being Grantham: Anglophonia and Marital Inaction
Everyone who writes about Downton Abbey accepts the premise that the show is a narrative of progress, the fin de siècle story of The Traditional that is about to be (and then is) buffeted by The Onrush of Modernity. It’s to the show’s credit that this is completely wrong.
X Marks the Spot: Occupy’s Architecture
Before it was Zuccotti Park, it was Liberty Plaza Park. The old name reflected the realities of Manhattan real estate, binding the park by association to the building that stands just north of it: One Liberty Plaza, a 54-story tower that necessitated the park’s very existence. The Park formerly known as Liberty Plaza, surfaced in
As if she lived a mad, gay life ...
“What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York...."
Sunday Reading
Political Movements in Bahrain, Past, Present, and Future What We Owe to Each Other: An Interview with David Graeber, Part 1 and Part 2. The Moscow Protests, part one, two, three,…
Predictive analytics and information camouflage
Marketers are mining our data trails to predict what we want and who we should be
Hate on Me
The logic of anti–hate crime legislation is seductively easy to support, but it fails to account for the hate built into law enforcement
Boor and Peace: The Russian Occupation of Paris and the Birth of the Bistro
The cosmopolitan leisure that the Parisian café has come to symbolize belies its humbler origin. The story of its emergence is written in blood and fire, namely, that which was spilled and ignited during the Napoleonic Wars.
Beauty Blogosphere 2.17.12
What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between. From Head... Headucation: African-American hair salons have a long history…
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