Pryor Restraint
...had become too entrenched in our culture to make out. Black American movie stardom existed before Richard Pryor, flourished even, but through the lens of his arc from ace comic...
The Scapegoating Machine
...secular governance with the decline of the sacred as an organizing principle of culture; but he also detects the residues of sacrificial religion everywhere, especially in the regular resurgence of...
Sowing Scarcity
...surpasses capitalist directed wage labor. This is late capitalism’s inverted world, where business and government treat nature as infinite but strictly ration culture. Thus does capitalism, billed in every economics...
Sunday Reading
...Battle of Algiers Sterilizing the Bible The history of the Fondaco dei Turchi in Venice Persian influences on Southeast Asian Islamic culture The female majlis painters of 'Asir province in...
Presumed conspicuous
...culture (necessitated by grow-at-all-costs capitalism) and its promises of social fluidity, the boundaries of social caste are maintained less through tradition and bloodlines and such but through appropriately staged taste...
Ramadan Diaries, Day Four
...of the Old Wild West," and the erasure of Black outlawry from popular culture and American mythology. I don't believe in coincidence, and my mind ponders how many more cowboy...
Digressions of an Opium-Eater
...new fluidity of culture and experience for the street’s denizens. That Dimple finds her encounter with the artist as confusing and traumatic as eye-opening and exciting hints at the coming...
Value-seeking surveillance and The Hunger Games
...state makes that entertainment. In our world, the culture industry alone used to turn that stuff out -- ironically enough, The Hunger Games phenomenon is exactly this sort of entertainment...
You are totally unreliable Twitter
...irritated that I tweet about rape culture; if you follow me because we went to school together, all sorts of things I tweet about may surprise you. In other words,...
Fires of Resistance
...collective actions against empire. Indigenous rage then is, quite literally, grounded in the resurgence of Indigenous life and derived from a shared love of place, land, culture, and nation. “Place”,...
Sunday Reading
...Syrian Dialect for the Use of Visitors to Syria and Palestine (1901) Vintage Arab Maths Questions Kerim Friedman: Language is a complex tapestry of trade, conquest and culture Can ‘They’...
Sunday Reading
...orthodoxy among seismologists is that earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings kill people.” Remembering the Armenian Genocide Speech for the Armenian Genocide Centennial Commemoration in Istanbul The Epic of a Genocide...
Bad Faith
...“August 4, 2014,” an excerpt from They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, a recently published collection of essays by Hanif Abdurraqib, a quotidian telling of an airplane journey...
Paradoxes: On Suicide and Literature
...kill themselves more often than other professionals. Statistically speaking, doctors have the highest suicide rates. Nonetheless, because of their special relationship with language, writers have a special relationship to death...
Dead and Going to Die
...Powell was to kill the secretary of state, and their co-conspirator, George Atzerodt, was to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson. Atzerodt failed to attempt the assassination altogether. Powell followed through...
The Thick Blue Line
...out and kill now. He was so innocent. It just isn’t fair at all.” Ron Thomas joined her in saying that the defense “lied… continuously” about the character of his...