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Here are links to my latest work, Daily Posts from the archives (July 14-18) in case you missed them, and articles, old and new, from around the internet. My aim is not to give you up to the minute news, but a historical understanding of our current times—too many people see everything going on as uniquely special to the current moment. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook (I am not accepting new friends on the last platform, but you can use the “follow” option).
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Hello, hello!
Sometimes, I feel like I’m stuck inside a snow globe and the little scene inside is of the bleak landscape of 28 Days Later, with burnt out buildings and the metal corpses of cars everywhere. Things are not good, but hope is everywhere and we carry on.
I am working today, Friday the 18th, on a few more new essays but after that, I am taking a few weeks off to finally, finally get big projects done — I have shot past deadlines, and I really need to get the work done. In the meantime, I’ll probably write very short works, like the one below, every now and then, but won’t be back on a regular writing schedule for a little while. Thank you for your continued support!
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NEW WORK!
“This Is What It Feels Like,” a very short rumination that I hope you’ll enjoy. I loved writing it, and plan on more of these in the future.
As you know, I’ve always been interested in food, so here is “On Food and Seasonings.”
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FROM THE ARCHIVE!
A reminder: “First They Came for the Criminals.”
“Why Is America Turning to Shit?” (This is about actual shit and toilets.)
My favourite interview, with Michael Kinnucan, in Hypocrite Reader, Part One:
“There’s No Rescuing the Concept of Equality.”
And Part Two: “The Ideal Neoliberal Subject is the Subject of Trauma.”
ELSEWHERE ON THE WEB!
Nothing we’re seeing with in immigration is new, and yet so much seems to be. The Postville Raid happened in 2008, during George W. Bush’s tenure, but it’s not as if policies drastically changed with Obama (who deported far more people). In new and forthcoming work, I will consider the question: Are things worse, and in what way?
Also a 2010 reminder, from Sherilynn Ifill, that American prisons have been nightmares of filth and overcrowding for a long while: “Keeping America’s Prisons Overcrowded.”
From 2012, “Euphemisms, Concentration Camps And The Japanese Internment,” by Edward Schumacher-Matos and Lori Grisham.
Many of us in Chicago are sick and tired of former mayor Rahm Emanuel’s many declarations that he might run for president. He was the absolute worst, and this 2016 In These Times report by Rebecca Burns explains his role in the Laquan McDonald case.
In Monthly Review, Michael Yates interviews Chris Townsend about some “Hard Truths About the US Labor Movement.”
Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish student who was kidnapped off the streets, is free and has an account of her imprisonment in an ICE prison. She writes about the friendships she forged with her fellow prisoners and how they spoke of “one day, when we are free.” (This should be unpaywalled, but let me know if you can’t access it.)
From Democracy Now, “A group called Writers Against the War on Gaza has published a dossier accusing The New York Times of pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian bias.” You can read their dossier here.
In Middle East Eye, William Johnson writes about “How America’s entertainment industry manufactured silence on Gaza.”
In Hyperallergic, Laura O’Connor writes about how a “Stripper Collective’s Life Drawing Merges Sex Work and Art.”
And Truthout may be the only publication writing about the specific dangers faced by immigrant and undocumented sex workers, in this report, “Sex Workers Are Being Abducted by ICE — and Abandoned by Respectability Politics,” by Kate Zen & Chanelle Gallant. Please support their work!
Also in Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson points out, “You Could Just Not Deport People.”
Given my interest in plagiarism, I was intrigued by this new charge against Damien Hirst.
An older Salman Toor painting of Zohrab Mamdani has resurfaced, and it’s the most gloriously gay thing ever and I love it: it reminds me John Singer Sargent’s paintings and sketches of his friends and assorted men.
Alicia Eler writes about the enduring power of the selfie (I never take any with people I don’t know, so, clearly, my days of fame are already doomed).
I’ve yet to watch Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino’s most famous film. But this, about his forgotten films, by Ciara Moloney in Current Affairs, is excellent.
Stay well, all. Everything changes every day, and all we can do is hold on to the fiction of routines.
I will see you next week.
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Image: “Konstruktion B VI,” by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1922.
