Baghdad, Utopia
...to die. Perhaps all writing about the dead carries with it the danger of aestheticizing real suffering and real struggle. But writing Jawad’s life is a way of negotiating and...
Feral Memes
...Cat’s scowling puss was a single message: “DIE.” Grumpy Cat had been enlisted in the War on Terror. The Grumpy Cat bomb met its match just a year later with...
Pandemic
...“in this together,” the pandemic did not produce the communal bonds that collective trauma typically yields. Instead, it further exposed and intensified “disparities,” which were often described––by public health officials,...
The Flies That Bind
...terrible whispering feet silenced, anchored in glue, there to die and loll and rustle with breezes, macabre chitinous decor. A display of corpses in spiral vortex, a strip of wallpaper...
Open Office Plan
In an office tower belonging to a new-media company in lower Manhattan, employees live, sleep, advertise products, and occasionally write content, together. And they aren't allowed to leave.
Sunday Reading
...York The particular, social torture of disappearances Methodological nationalism "An inspiration to those who are completely willing to cast aside their humanity and work their way up the corporate ladder"...
Drama for Cannibals
...Shakespeare Behind Bars. This American Life devoted a whole acoustic-guitar-scored episode to a prison production of Hamlet’s Act V. In Italy, Caesar Must Die, the newest film from Paolo and...
Black Arts Boomerang
...new “Wizard of Watts” Adult Swim cartoon, and Kendrick Lamar’s “Untitled Track” Colbert performance have directly addressed our racial justice struggles. Lamar’s lyric, "we don’t die, we multiply!", was repeated...
Humid, All Too Humid
...effort? Are we prepared for 150,000,000 to die in Bangladesh when we let the water run a moment too long? Ah, it will be a tragedy, but at least the...
Bad News
...corporate media’s ideological inertia. Previous works, such as I Feel Your Pain (2011) and The Armory Show Focus Group (2013), engagingly splice together the romantic comedy and the political interview,...
Unthinkable Tableaus
...part of a very well-established genre (for example: Let the Devil Sleep “tells the story of how Trócaire's partner the Commission for Justice and Peace helped to bring together perpetrators...
A Woman Under the Influence
Mary MacLane's spectacular moods first fueled, then failed her
Bun of Contention
...bread" from Henriette Davidis's Praktisches Kochbuch für die gewöhnliche und feinere Küche (1897): "1 litre milk, which must be lukewarm. 6-8 pounds refined rye flour and 100 grams good yeast....
Dans le Rouge
...die, you know,” he says, stoic. He would rather talk about “neoliberalism” - a word that nearly everyone, in an area where the speaking of French is a point of...
"Imagine What We'll Build for One Another": an Interview with Jules Gill-Peterson
Health justice scholar Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with historian Jules Gill-Peterson about anti-trans policy, eugenics, and the material stakes of desire
Batman Occupied
...Hence when the gas-masked villain tells Bruce that “When Gotham is in ruins, I give you permission to die,” Gotham gives way to America. We are left, then, with an...