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.
The History of Dialogue (4): Literary Ambition and Gender
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…
Arguing the Web (3): Post-Text
Once again, the sloppy scholarship of the layman and how the internet fuels his curiosity is under attack.
The History of Dialogue (3): Brecht vs. the HUAC
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…
The Art of the Interview (5): I Met the Walrus
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an…
The History of Dialogue (2): Joyce & Proust
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…
Arguing the Web (2): Correspondence
“Better save my letters,” Burroughs instructed Allen Ginsberg, “maybe we can get out a book of them later on when I have a rep.” This…
The History of Dialogue (1): Marx & Lincoln
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…
Les Trahisons des Clercs
I began to think more carefully about why Sartre might have been photographed. Cartier-Bresson took the portrait in 1946, less than a year since Sartre…
Betrayal!
If I were to start telling people about my discovery – as I’d be obliged to, once I’d identified the last photo – I’d also…
Naked and/or Dead
I connected the photographs with string and hung them from my office wall. Before me I saw fragments of an entire tradition caught up in…
Forest and Trees
Something untoward had been going on – there no longer seemed to be any question about that. But I thought perhaps I could make up…
The Third Man
I returned to Brassaï’s photo of the Pont des Arts. Though the fog seemed to have grown thicker. I could still make out its four…
Nightspawn
The other man in the first photograph is Gyula Halász. Operating under the pseudonym ‘Brassaï’, he left his native Hungary in 1924 and moved to…
Time Comes Around
One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of the Pont des Arts taken by Kertész in 1929. Taken from inside the…
In Memoriam, Salinger
In commemoration of J.D. Salinger, we repost one of our favorite essays, “Better to Fade Away than to Burn Out?” Editor Mary Borkowski defends authorial privacy in an era where digitally enabled self-promotion is the norm; and with the rise of self-publishing—an imperative.
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