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.
Bracing for disaster in 1990, St. Louisans’ knew that to single out their town for divine wrath would be to invite ridicule. They binge-drank and “pigged out,” secure in the geographical, geopolitical — indeed, cosmic — insignificance apparent to them every day.
Énard’s attempt to modernize the Iliad is even more explicit than Joyce’s attempt to modernize the Odyssey in Ulysses. Indeed, Zone reads as if it were narrated by Molly Bloom—were she to have been cast as a battle scarred Achilles rather than an unfaithful Penelope.
She’s earned our attention, weirdly enough, by being perfectly absent. I think Black is a spokesmodel for the concept that we needn’t envy the wealthy, since they are far more culturally clueless than we could have suspected.
The grid plan emanates from our weaknesses, this layout of avenues and streets, New York City, this system of 90 degree angles…it’s homogenizing, in a city where there is no homogenization available, where there is only total existence, total cacophony…
A review of Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness is the kind of criticism — pertinent, witty, sophisticated but without sophistry — in which one can glimpse a…
How often I feel, as if hearing a voice behind intermittent sounds, that I myself am the underlying bitterness of this life so alien to human life— a life in which nothing happens except in its self-awareness!
Ten years before she would publish Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë sent a poem to poet laureate Robert Southey asking for his opinion. Their resulting exchange is interesting…
Bertolt Brecht appeared before the HUAC on October 30, 1947. Brecht’s testimony consisted of wry jokes and evasions. He played dumb and frequently blamed sloppy…
Several Accounts of the Meeting Between James Joyce and Marcel Proust. From Proust at the Majestic by Richard Davenport-Hines: May 18, 1922. The Majestic, a…
Karl Marx writes to Abraham Lincoln on November 22, 1864 Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance…
Bail Bloc 2.0
Our work on immigration, ICE, borders, and detention
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.
