The literary
...literary book is just an occasion for asserting social power, restating one's claim to membership in the literary community, and reasserting that community's gate-keeping significance. In other words, there is...
Amniotechnics
...amnion, the placental tank. Gestation, like all labor, is cyborg. It is an unbalanced techno-social co-production involving less than two but more than one. Lest that sound cozy, molecular biologist...
The Will to Wall
...ever. Amen.” Those who travel precariously in a world of profound inequality, who are compelled to risk their lives in order to reach spaces of relative social and biophysical security,...
What It Takes to Build Your Credit: "Urban Zoning," by Billy Kahora, Week Two of Blogging the Caine
...appalling power cuts that have swept across the country every day since the long-delayed rains started – parts of the capital, Nairobi, have been in complete darkness for an age....
Editors' Note, Vol. 56: Violence
...(and free access to our archive of back issues) today. • • • THE first commandment of violence is that it precede power; the second, that it pose as power’s...
Work Appropriate
...the mermaids!) and guides to thrift store shopping. Whether she's examining how brands have the power to create community or the intersections between visibility, cosmetics, and self-harm, Cassie's reflective, inquisitive...
Eric's Trip
...Writing in the New Statesman in 1980, the late Edward Said traced a line from Orwell’s much celebrated plain-English sensibility to the complacently cozy relationship between journalism and power in...
The Magnetic North
...come to involve outbound travel, rather than focusing on the transference between patient and mesmerist? During the 19th century, and especially around the 1840s, mesmerists began to ask women under...
Dens of Bureaucracy
...with drug companies and cartels alike during the Cold War to develop various chemical military technologies and leverage on-the-ground power. But this double-dealing led to schizophrenic outcomes. Most spectacularly, during...
Scoreboard Jesus
...on the Mormon Church since Brigham Young University became a national football power,” Jerry Falwell commented when the fundamentalist Christian university he founded entered NCAA Division I football. Given all...
Care: The Highest Form of Capitalism
Premilla Nadasen’s latest book covers America's care economy, its carceral legacy, and the potential for intervention in systems of exploitation.
Violence
...THE first commandment of violence is that it precede power; the second, that it pose as power’s last resort. Because the last resort is always exceptional—we were left with...
The Management Estate
Objectivity in American newsrooms is a pastiche of colonial subjectivities
Vol. 19 Editors' Note: "Art"
...[sic] loving united states hating individual,’ a ‘gay ninja,’ a Taliban fighter, a ‘tribute to [President Barack] Obama’s birthday,’ and in ‘seriously poor taste’?”—point to the latent power of images,...
No Dignity, No Doubt
...power control the definition of the word. What if we’ve got Bouazizi’s example all wrong? *** Dignity, after all, has an undignified history. When Kim Jong Il died in December,...
In Defense of Looting
...Precisely the image that the Ferguson police tried to evoke to assassinate Michael Brown’s character and justify his killing post facto. It is a completely righteous and understandable position. However,...