Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
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.
Paradoxes: On Suicide and Literature
Even unfinished, it is a brilliant work, an exploration of some of life’s deepest challenges, and an enterprise of extraordinary artistic daring. David set out…
Paradoxes: On Suicide and Literature
(via) Even unfinished, it is a brilliant work, an exploration of some of life’s deepest challenges, and an enterprise of extraordinary artistic daring. David…
Herzog's Caves
(via) Just when you thought the world was a horrible, boring place full of assholes, Werner Herzog makes a movie in 3D. And not only…
Death Is Not The End
A review of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief The recent publication of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief (in a new translation by Dustin Condren) calls for a renewed…
Un(der)known Writers: Nicola Chiaromonte
“The individual who has lived through a great historical upheaval has not only been dispossessed of his beliefs. He has found himself face to face with a reality that goes far beyond him and everyone else.
Who's Afraid of The Big Bad Little Girl?
Saoirse Ronan/Emily Browning The Young-Girl doesn’t look like a dead body, as one might presume from reading women’s magazines; she looks like death itself. Tiqqun, Raw…
Unfree Labor
A review of Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy Taped up in my dorm room there…
The Art of the Interview: Frederic Tuten
My first book was The Adventures of Mao on the Long March. Roy Lichtenstein did the cover for me. Roy was really the reason it got published because no one wanted to take it. Nobody, nobody, would take the book.
The Art of Cuisine: Mediterranean
A review of A Book of Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David New York Review Books Classics, 203 pp., $14.95 In 1939 Elizabeth David, a lord’s…
Letters of Recommendation: C. Wright Mills to Fidel Castro
For there is no nonsense in this man about Communism or anti-Communism. He is an honest observer and straight thinker.
Fringe Feminists: Ulrike Meinhof
It seems that an unjust world is still having problems justly distributing its injustices.
Adolescence of the Undead
It is often said of fiction that it is “impossible to put down.” The suggestion is that what we want from reading is total submission:…
Piece of Candy
The original tribe of self-proclaimed Superstars, however, was Andy Warhol’s Factory crew of “odds-and-ends misfits, somehow misfitting together,” as the artist described them in his memoir, Popism. Within this tribe, the Warhol Superstar that most extravagantly combined silver screen Hollywood glamour with downtown New York chic was Candy Darling, the transsexual actress who worked alongside
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