AMLO All Along
Obradorismo was nationalist austerity governance under the pretense of left-wing populism
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.
The Tourist Sublime
When we travel, the meanings consumerism ascribes to objects become opaque, and the choices we have to make — where to eat, where to go, what to do — can abruptly seem arbitrary, pointless. The ubiquitous marketing discourse that normally serves to orient us instead prompts terror in the midst of plenty. The consumerist bounty
Lost & Found (4)
Dispatches from the Reanimation Library: "Hypnography: A Study in the Therapeutic Use of Hypnotic Painting." Mears, Ainslie. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1957.
The Art of the Blurb (4)
W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) introduces "Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall" by Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682).
Open Books: The E-Reader Reads You
E-books promise not a plenitude of ideas and narratives but a wealth of information to better rationalize the unpredictable behavior of readers. E-readers make us into the content.
The Art of the Obituary (8): Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist, (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) He did not give “a flying fuck” what he smoked, or ingested, or…
Reading Slowly
(via) “Wordsworth claims that ‘the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ It seems to me…
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