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.
(via) My vocation [as a writer] changed everything: the sword-strokes fly off, the writing remains; I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be…
Dinner on a Man-of-War, Anonymous, ca. 1893 Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay’s sharp, scintillating 1856 biography of British author Samuel Johnson turned out to be quite…
Dispatches from the Reanimation Library Danger! Icebergs Ahead! Poole, Lynn and Gray Johnson Poole. New York: Random House, 1961. The Reanimation Library is a…
Monologue from The Cruise (1998) The image makes me think of this conversation with this woman the other day. She was this fastidious Judaic type woman…
John Tremblay at Francesca Pia (Contemporary Art Daily) “Writing, as such, takes an almost intolerable combination of hubris and naiveté. This has destroyed many a…
One solution to the publishing quandary is in these very editions. To make books more appealing as objects, even as aesthetic objects thanks to thoughtful design, taps into part of what makes reading a pleasure as a tangible sport, not something you download and scroll through on an electronic device.
H. Ellen Browning, distant relative of English poet Robert Browning, chronicles her adventures in Eastern Europe in her travel memoir A Girl’s Wanderings in Hungary…
(via) “On Facebook, our communication is assessed like online advertising — how many click-throughs did it inspire? This prompts us to make what we say…
It’s a great moment in Pedro Almodóvar’s film Todo Sobre Mi Madre: A transsexual woman stands on a stage and explains all the reconstructive and cosmetic…
Annie Leibovitz, Susan at the House on Hedges Lane (1988), Brooklyn Museum Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) She was bookish almost from birth.…
Some excerpts from Timothy “Speed” Levitch’s Speedology (2002) 1. The Fastest Way to Adventure is to Stand Still Boredom is an illusion. Boredom is the…
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.
