AMLO All Along
Obradorismo was nationalist austerity governance under the pretense of left-wing populism
Don't Stop Beliebing
If it were opportunistic, it would have a better beat. It’s so earnest and guileless that it’s completely unappealing. It really shows how pointless endorsing Occupy Wall Street is as a gesture. You also can’t dance to it.
The Failure Addict
John Phillips mastered the art of serial disappointment by sharing it compulsively. This makes him a harbinger of the social media age
Today: International Day of Action
Today: International Day of Action
On the Skin of the World
(image via) On From the Observatory by Julio Cortázar (Archipelago Books) By Mark de Silva Julio Cortázar’s fiction is dominated by questions of knowledge: what it consists in,…
Between the Bars
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s On Booze, from the New Directions Pearl series by Jessica Ferri Unless one has the time and money to turn writing into…
What Is an Artist?
A glossary of artists
The Resentment Machine
(Geoff McFetridge, via) The immiseration of the digital creative class The popular adoption of the internet has brought with it great changes. One of the peculiar…
Consider the Humblebrag
Roy Lichtenstein Girl in Mirror (1964) What false modesty gains from a new medium By Matt Pearce On Twitter, he calls himself Totes McGotes. He’s…
Empire Goes to College
On Gigi Roggero’s The Production of Living Knowledge (Temple University Press) Recent college graduates seem to have more debt than marketable skills. Could this actually be…
Redefining the Right Wing
Let me begin by agreeing that political conservatism is typically born in reaction and backlash...Postwar conservatism in America has certainly been defined by a series of reactions against rapid or large-scale social and political changes.
Scenes from Occupied Oakland
Had Oakland become a war zone? Did the protesters’ marches up and down Broadway and Telegraph and their attempts to reoccupy the plaza constitute a riot? How easy is it to shift the line between what is peaceful and what is violent in what activists are just calling “the movement”?
Not Your Friend: Dissensus and the Police
(“Circle of Truth Hovering over The USA” by The London Police) On police cooperation with the status quo and occupiers’ cooperation with the police One of the most…
Money, Sex and Tweens
Two YA novelists discuss the gender politics of literature’s biggest growth industry John M. Cusick (JC) is an editor at Armchair/Shotgun and literary agent specializing in YA…
Zombie Novel
A review of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One From all accounts, it is Colson Whitehead’s time. The Brooklyn writer, 140-character artist, and MacArthur fellow is set…
The Missing Medium
A review of Ian Bogost’s How to Do Things with Videogames It is sometimes possible to love something so much that you carry its worst…
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