A new book on the political economy of shipping covers how the labor behind global supply chains has both transformed since post 9/11 securitization and remained brutally the same since shipping's earliest days.
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—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
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.
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.
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
The temptation to dismiss multimedia artist Laurel Nakadate as a wallowing narcissist, a sub-Jackass-level prankster, or an emotional terrorist is strong. She appears as all those things in the retrospective of her work at P.S. 1, inviting the audience’s contempt as well as their lascivious stares.
In this way, the gay political project wasn’t just emancipatory or messianic, nor could it be exhausted by a list of demands; from within, it undercut capitalism’s charge that there be no alternative by fucking a different world into being.
The answer’s never easy. You can’t just go back and say, ‘Well, his mama got on him when he was a little boy, and he never got over it.’ Welll, maybe that’s true, but that won’t take you very far.
Sweetie, my relationship record indicates a guy who’s bad news. And more and more now lately I’ve been afraid that you’re going to get hurt, that I might hurt you the way I seem to have hurt others who—”
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.
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.
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.
