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, […]

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.