Little Privatized Suns

Joan Didion would have known what to say about Richard Stockton Rush III. I’m almost surprised she never wrote about him. He was a pure effusion of California plutocracy, someone in whom amour-propre had been sublimed over generations, each forebear transforming a bit more of the dross of ordinariness into something insipid yet undeniably compelling, […]

On Daniel Ellsberg

The drama of Ellsberg’s life, however unique his circumstances, isn’t alien or inaccessible, because it is also the drama of a political life as such: the steady, growing awareness of one’s participation in a system that one understands to be intolerable, and the eventual action that breaks with it. On this path, he was helped along not just by the antiwar movement, but by a number of others who were somewhere along the same path, even if they didn’t end up where he did.

Mating

The birds unveiled themselves slowly, first by sound and then by sight. Despite what you might expect from the term, the “booming” call of the greater prairie chicken sounds, in reality, more like a mournful coo. When several chickens let out the call at once, they meld together into a swirling, plaintive chant.

I’m Fucking Agitated, Are You Going to Murder Me?

Real estate greed, the glutted police budget, ceaseless gentrification, racist journalists, Eric Adams, Kathy Hochul, white people—we cycled through the injustices, against them, resuscitating despair into focused rage.

J. D. Vance Changes the Subject

Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening.

J. D. Vance Changes the Subject

Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening. This massive new collective burden was piled on a society already stumbling under the weight of organized abandonment, environmental racism, for-profit health care, and mass incarceration. Vance, in the end, cannot abide the idea that what he suffered has to do with any of that disabling stuff.

Florida in Philadelphia

The strike at Temple, therefore, was not just about material benefits for graduate workers: it was also about the long-term structural nature of what the contemporary university will be. It was about exposing the precarity of everyone—not just graduate workers but also adjuncts and even TT faculty—under academia’s current system.

The Road to Auto Debt

For most of us, our cars, no matter how much we cherish them, hold us in social and economic custody. As more and more vehicles are financed, and with higher loans and interest rates, creditors exert a carceral pull over our ability to earn a sustainable livelihood. Perhaps the most telling evidence of this servitude is that, in times of financial stress, households will prioritize their monthly car payments over all others, including basic necessities. Surely it is the mark of our perverse civilization when food, medical care, and housing have to take a back seat to our need to keep wheels on the road.

It Is Happening Again

How many times have we seen this drama play out in the last several decades? Every presidential administration wants to fix America’s “crumbling infrastructure” until they discover the business interests profiting from disrepair.

Corky Lee and the Work of Seeing

There is a symmetry between Corky Lee’s passing and the rise of Stop Anti-Asian Hate: the departure of Asian America’s greatest documentarian and its most visible recent efflorescence. Years earlier, the brief window of postwar Asian American radicalism seemed to have already swung shut. Today, our most notable figures are corporate CEOs and conservative politicians, the eponymous Asians rich and crazy, so the artists, revolutionaries, and workers preserved in Lee’s prints can feel as elusive as their author. No matter how distant an Asian American poor people’s movement may seem, his prints still vibrate with radical temporality and potential.