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.
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…
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. At the…
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. At the…
Seeing Through Transparency
(via tsevis) We fight for data because corporate media, blogs, and hacker pronouncements alike tell us that information is power, and that anarchic explosions of data…
Fringe Feminists: Patti Smith
Photo: Patti Smith: Horses by Lester Bangs Creem Magazine, February 1976: Patti’s heroes may be gone, but she is both with us and for us, so…
It Gets Worse
The dissonance between the two poles, between puppy and wolf, altar boy and Rosemary’s baby, is the heart of Odd Future’s sound Since Roland Barthes…
The Post-Colonial Space Opera
A Review of China Miéville’s Embassytown Over the course of a career which has produced eight novels, a collection of short fiction and, a non-fiction book on…
Comfortably Alone
(via Javier Rodriguez) Social media puts an end to shyness by generalizing its pathology As a shy person, I’ve believed for most of my life that…
History Repeating: The Weblog
Pamphlets are as modish ornaments to gentlewomen’s toilets as to gentlemen’s pockets; they carry reputation of wit and learning to all that make them their companions; the poor find their account in stall-keeping and in hawking them; the rich find in them their shortest way to the secrets of church and state.
Un(der)known Writers: Lev Shestov
We live surrounded by an endless multitude of mysteries. But no matter how enigmatic may be the mysteries which surround being, what is most enigmatic and disturbing is that mystery in general exists and that we are somehow definitely and forever cut off from the sources and beginnings of life.
Paradoxes: On Suicide and Literature
An act, followed by a text, followed by an interpretation of both, of one through the other and back again: suicide has a great deal in common with literature.
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