AMLO All Along
Obradorismo was nationalist austerity governance under the pretense of left-wing populism
Un(der)known Writers: Harry Crews
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.
The Art of Faking It: David Foster Wallace
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 History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers
A dialogue between Teach, an adjunct philosophy instructor at a public university in New York, and Cheat, who has authored over 100 papers for pay.
The Art of Cuisine: Fragrant Vapors of Goulash
In her absence, her father, a meager pensioner with a passion for heraldry, blazonry, archivology, and sigillography, absconds with his wife for the King of Hungary, a local restaurant, to determine whether what their daughter, a champion of simple, economical home-cooked meals, says of eating places was in fact true: that they serve nothing but
Love in the Age of Self-Consciousness
Tradition — “how things are done here” — has been fatally disrupted. We can enter an elevator in any city or an Italian restaurant in any American town and understand what to expect and what to do. And thanks to the universality of money and the pervasive norms of capitalist market exchange, we trust we
School's Out Forever
The hope is that every student has a teacher or two over a decade and a half that really makes them question and think, but either way, we silently acknowledge that they’ll spend the majority of their young vigor-filled lives quivering at the arbitrary mercy of petty kooks and jowly tyrants.
The Mirror-Slave Dialectic
When I traced my face shape onto my mirror with lipstick, I was bowing to the needs of my inner slave. I was reaching toward the looking-glass and willing the world contained therein to reveal a great insight. Tell me my face shape so I may never again have an unflattering haircut, ye mirror!
The Captive Audience
I do not mean to imply that these were the best films (if you want to call them that) of the decade. Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, the Dardenne brothers, and Bela Tarr all have claims on that title. But some kind of tipping point has been reached.
Playing Against Type
Midnight in Paris and the Many Wives of Woody Allen
Death is Not the End
The recent publication of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief (in a new translation by Dustin Condren) calls for a renewed investigation of the political, intellectual and religious…
Place Matters
As more aspects of our lives are digitized, literature is an increasingly crucial means of expressing, understanding, and preserving places and their influences.
Heroine: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
A review of Out of the Vinyl Deeps by Ellen Willis
The Art of Cuisine: "Such Lawless Cake"
Photo: The Moonshiner's Daughter, N. Brock, 1900 "I was usually left with her while both families went to church on Sabbath mornings and well remember being…
runs/Away from his own applause.
(via John Foster) On sense and subjectivity in the poetry of Dan Beachy-Quick We fear that we can’t communicate our thoughts or experience to others. When…
Un(der)known Writers: Alberto Savinio
Via Literalab Operatic Lives: “Isadora Duncan” (1942) In Nice it was raining. Apollo and Diana stood at the curb, covered by black raincoats. When the automobile…
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