Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
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…
Occupy A Bank
What’s next for Occupy Everything? If you’ve been watching at home, you know the showdown with our lady finance only gets good when state force…
Youth is Never Reactionary
Youth is never reactionary; youth is progressive in time and hence always in the avant garde, hence never wrong in spirit, hence never to be…
Death by Twitter
On Teju Cole’s small fates Gary Robinson once tried to cut seven people in line at a Church’s Chicken in Miami. It was near closing…
Reader's Digest
A Review of Balzac’s Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac So strange and hectic a phantasmagoria were the…
A Bridge to Somewhere
From the Brooklyn Bridge to One Police Plaza and back again 3:00 pm: The crowd at Zuccotti Park, larger than any day except the one…
Advertisements for Norman Mailer
lareviewofbooks: Jonathan Lethem, on his obsession with an immortal literary character. 1. There once was a boy who fell in love with Norman Mailer, a writer who…
Toward a Reading of Post-Kanye Hip-Hop
The rise of swagger and the increasing irrelevance of haters The past decade has seen the meteoric rise of a new subject position in the…
Fear of an Ape Planet
Debating the blinkered Hollywood take on race in films like The Help and Rise of the Apes only helps perpetuate it Positive or negative, reviews of a new film…
To Sit on a Throne of Teeth, Graced With a Crown of Teeth
This has been a summer of blown opportunities, at least insofar as cinema allegedly devoted to taking those opportunities goes.
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