A Week Late and A Story Short: "Whispering Trees"
...and asked to discuss oral literature. We didn't. After a few false starts, the discussion finally found itself contemplating the literary and aesthetic values of rap music and slam poetry....
Empire Records
...while Muslim must have been dots crying out to be connected. In order to do so, it tried to turn Ould Slahi’s itinerant nature against him, by targeting him at...
Lady Wranglers
...all levels, and I’ve been increasingly curious about where this pernicious idea came from, how people have tried to address it, and why it persists. This semester, I’m teaching a...
Sweet VR of California
Sweet Valley is a digital utopia where bodiless souls can explore psychedelic understandings through a networked VR high-school cult
My Gay Shame, or, How Patriarchy Stole Sex
...to be anonymous, I wanted my own desire and not to be only desire’s object. I know this is a wildly optimistic reading of what gay sex culture promises women,...
Confessions of an American Pumpkin Eater
...Teachers tried to mitigate the problem by writing multiple versions of the same test, swapping in different versions of the same questions, or mixing up their order. That may have...
A Country Disappeared
...education system (controlled by the teacher’s union) and open PEMEX, the state-owned oil company and Mexico’s main source of income, to private investment. Buried under these sweeping structural adjustments, and...
Permanent Display
...autonomy, does it reflect also on privacy? I tried to introduce a certain questioning into public space. By working on people’s gaze with the practice of “hijabizing” in the subway,...
The Will to Wall
...thousands of unauthorized migrants have perished since the mid-1990s, and elsewhere. He recounts one particularly horrific case, that of 15-year-old Felani Khatun, who in January 2011 tried to surreptitiously cross...
Data Streams
...the Intercept. It’s a single frame of scrambled video imagery, and I tried to connect that with some of the metaphors that the analysts themselves use to describe the job...
Rhetoric and Tone: A Debate
...he has never even tried. I believe it is utterly childish to deflect that obvious journalistic/professional transgression with so cartoonish and incendiary an analogy and in calling it out as...
Santorum's Gifts
...George Stephanopoulos on Saturday, Santorum tried to limit himself to emphasizing the honor and dignity of labor that does not require a degree: STEPHANOPOULOS: Now getting to college has been...
One If by Land, Two If by Sea
...high-profile border operation in San Diego like the one that had just been tried in El Paso (Operation Blockade, later Hold the Line). The implementation of Operation Gatekeeper in San...
Cruise Control
...spaces where men could come together — the ruined factory cities — have been swept up in the name of real-estate values. The privatized remnants of this vibrant sex culture,...
Cosmopolitican, or Cosmetics as Police Regime
...for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice tried to force a woman out of the mall after they spotted her wearing nail polish. The difference between this...
A Bridge to Somewhere
...people in an unventilated metal box for hours get really hot, and a few started to get faint. We shifted them to the cooler floor, and tried to conserve water....