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.
Dances With Anarchists
“The most dangerous woman in America,” dead for seven decades, lingers on. Emma Goldman’s legacy has not always seemed so secure. There was little use…
Rioting Nonconsumers
Is rioting an expression of envy, or something more political, or something that is ultimately inexplicable? From Zygmunt Bauman's response to the London riots: We…
Bad Romance
For his Spring 2007 collection, fashion designer Alexander McQueen staged his presentation in the round at the Cirque d’hiver-Bouglione, the legendary circus in Paris. A…
Yes We Keynes!
A review of Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us by John Quiggin
Intimacy as Text; Twitter as Toungue
“Internet socialization is far closer to a 19th century mode of intimacy than to a dystopian future of tragically disconnected robot prostitutes. There’s a Jane Austen-ish quality to online social life. The written word gains unmatched power and inarguable primacy.”
Epic Fail
On July 1, prisoners in the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in Northern California began a hunger strike to protest egregious human rights abuses perpetrated…
Rapture, Rainbows and Reproduction
“Recording and sharing our response to natural beauty promises a kind of feedback loop….It’s mastery and surrender simultaneously.”
Going LeBron
The “skills myth”—namely, that one is better equipped to read, Google things, and follow orders after earning a B.A.—will crumble. Overdeveloped analytical skills and inflated expectations will become liabilities as hoards of nubile young hopefuls climb over each other to work for free. Forget gap years, camp counseling, or waiting tables. Teenagers will work in
Social Media, Social Factory
Social media—Facebook and other similar services that have integrated with portable devices to permit continuous interactivity—have furthered consumerism’s ameliorating mission. They enhance the compensations of consumerism by making it seem more self-revelatory, less passively conformist, conserving the signifying power of our lifestyle gestures by broadcasting them to a larger audience and making them seem less
Towards A New Film Criticism
What is Hollywood? Hollywood is a pool of money, power, and people. Hollywood is a monomaniacal schizophrenic, making films at the voices’ instruction. Each film represents a different voice in its head; some are violent, some frightening, some romantic, some beautiful. But all of them praise the perfect beauty of the commodified image.
Sins of the Father
What made Breaking Bad's Walt so endearing was his awkward, reticent Dad love and the unimaginable lengths he went to to provide for his family. With his body count racking up, Walt’s paternal rationalization is harder to buy.
Is Entourage Sorry?
I gave up watching Entourage about the same time I gave up flipping through Maxim magazine at newsstands. Even though they both appealed to part of me, it was a dark sad part that I knew I had to grow out of, or risk being stuck in perpetual adolescence. But last summer, my brother was
From Russia With Literature
An interview with editor Natasha Perova on Russian literature after perestroika
Bad Mothers
On the Casey Anthony Trial and Ruby C. Tapia’s "American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death, and the Maternal."
A Library Sans Livres
Will the library of the future be a reliquary of precious artifacts or the information processor that obliterates them?
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