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.
Play Fair, Run Fast, and Smile for the Camera
When I was living in Madrid, I read an article in El País one day that spoke of el valorado concepto anglosajón de “fair play” —the valued Anglo-Saxon concept…
The Art of Cuisine (8): Cakes and Tarts
When the delight of frolicking with his pets wears thin, the count feasts on large fruit tarts, which he inundates with jugs of cream.
Portrait of the Artist as a Left Fielder
If sports have value, it is as art. They are a platform on which athletes and teams stretch themselves to species capacity for the ephemeral…
What We Talk About When We Talk About the Internet
The computer is the liar that always tells the truth. If you believe the lie—that what the computer does is beyond human comprehension, that its power exceeds its use value—then you are doomed to be its slave.
The Faces of Rimbaud
The personality of the adult Rimbaud, who writes letters home to his mother detailing and bewailing the state of his finances, is so different from that of the adolescent poète maudit that it seems improbable that the two belonged to the same person. Then again, Rimbaud, like us all, was always full of contradictions.
No Man Righteous
Bob Dylan’s reactionary album Slow Train Coming exemplifies fundamentalism’s alluring promise of the escape from identity.
The Art of Memoir: Outside is Trouble
If I am, in fact, the type of person who recognizes himself in a reflection, then I can say while at the Vietnam Memorial there is one member of my family elegized, mirrored, because that is a condition too, like war and tectonics: Every so often we forget that we are we who we think
Quakes and Ale: Comparing Cultures in Catastrophe
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.
Achilles 2.0
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.
The History of Dialogue: Black Friday
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.
Twilight of the Cruise
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…
The Chosen People
The authors of The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz, in conversation with TNI.
The Unbearable Awkwardness of Being
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…
The History of Dialogue (5): Snobs on Snobbery
There is a difference between being (and the desire to be) well-read and being (and the desire to be) thought well-read.
The Art of Memoir (1)
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!
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