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In Wroclaw, Poland is a lively terraced house that reflects the youthful energy of the couple who owns it. Designed by Znamy się for the owners, and their two dogs, who love to cook, entertain friends, and play board games. Drawing inspiration from the whimsical world of Playshapes (wooden blocks that can be moved, layered, or combined), this modern home now boasts a fusion of structures, forms, and vibrant colors that bolster creativity, socializing, and play.
The new interior holds many elements that allow the owners to play with form. Moveable furniture sets the stage with shelves on wheels that enable the couple to create flexible arrangements and new spaces. The kitchen island is not only the place for food prep and cooking, it stores board games and houses water dispensers for their beloved dogs. The dining table’s top lifts to play games and work puzzles.
Geometric shapes and a strong palette of colors intertwine forming layered spaces rich in textures and visual intrigue. The inclusion of lots of wooden elements gives nod to Playshapes, while adding organic charm.
Three shelves set within a blue painted alcove hold a large selection of plants and objects for a touch of biophilia.
The square dining table lives under one of the hanging grids that holds plants. Similar gridded structures live alongside the wooden staircase adding a pop of color while providing safety for those climbing the stairs.
The bathroom features similar wooden cabinets as the kitchen island with geometric patterns adorning the fronts. An inset cabinet is painted a playful pink on the inside, pairing nicely with the black and white floor tile.
Photography by Migdal Studio.
Group issues 12-point plan calling for stricter immigration rules for care workers, students and refugees
Rishi Sunak is facing demands from “red wall” Conservative MPs to slash the number of overseas care workers, foreign students and refugees allowed into the UK in time for the next election.
The MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, who call themselves the New Conservatives, have issued a 12-point plan to cut net migration to Britain from 606,000 to 226,000 before the end of 2024.
A cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees accepted for resettlement in the UK.
Caps on future humanitarian schemes such as the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong schemes should the predicted 168,000 reductions not be realised.
Implementation of the provisions of the illegal migration bill, which it is claimed would lead to a reduction of at least 35,000 from LTIM.
A raise in the minimum combined income threshold to £26,200 for sponsoring a spouse and raising the minimum language requirement to B1 (intermediate level). This should lead to an estimated 20,000 reduction in LTIM, the MPs claim.
Making the migration advisory committee report on the effect of migration on housing and public services, not just the jobs market, by putting future demand on a par with labour requirements in all studies.
A 5% cap on the amount of social housing that councils can give to non-UK nationals.
Raising the immigration health surcharge to £2,700 per person a year.
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As Rhode Island School of Design’s (RISD) 18th president, Crystal Williams believes that education, art and design, and staying committed to equity and justice are essential to transforming our society. At RISD, the Detroit-born activist is working to drive meaningful change centered on expanding inclusion, equity, and access. To back that up, Crystal has more than two decades of higher education experience as a professor of English as well as serving in roles that oversaw diversity, equity, and inclusion at Boston University, Bates College, and Reed College. The ultimate goal behind Crystal’s role at RISD is to enhance the learning environment by making sure it includes diverse experiences, viewpoints, and talents.
Photo: Jo Sittenfeld
However, Crystal’s talents go beyond the halls and classrooms of colleges and universities – she’s also an award-winning poet and essayist. So far, she’s published four collections of poems and is the recipient of several artistic fellowships, grants, and honors. Most recently Detroit as Barn, was named as a finalist for the National Poetry Series, Cleveland State Open Book Prize, and the Maine Book Award. Crystal’s third collection, Troubled Tongues, was awarded the 2009 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2009 Oregon Book Award, the Idaho Poetry Prize, and the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize. Her first two books were Kin and Lunatic, published in 2000 and 2002. Crystal’s work regularly appears in leading journals and magazines nationwide.
Today, Crystal Williams is joining us for Friday Five!
Martha’s Vineyard \\\ Photo: Crystal Williams
Originally, I was going to write about a place that inspires me. But when I truly started to consider places I find inspiring, I realized that each of them elicits and enables silence and stillness, a refraction of silence (at least for me). So then, silence itself is the thing that inspires me. Silence inspires me to delve and investigate and allows me to situate myself in wonder and awe – in the amplitude and magnitude of who and what and how we are as a species, to sometimes take issue with personal fears or traumas or worse – the behaviors that ultimately impede personal and spiritual growth or insight.
For me, silence is a great gift. Perhaps the greatest. It is a balm. Through it, I connect to the world not as Crystal Williams of this particular body but as a congregation of embodied energy and spirit. In this way, it is the catalyst through which all good art, poetry, ideas, and leadership emerge. So it is among the most inspirational things in my life – and among the most rare, given my life.
Photo: Crystal Williams
I admire many poems. But Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me” (which is how it is commonly known although Clifton did not, in “Book of Light” originally title the poem), is the one that inspires me the most. It is a poem that speaks to resilience, fortitude, bravery, imagination, hope, and it names what being a Black woman in the United States can and often does elicit.
“won’t you celebrate with me
what I have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
….
…come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.”
Nancy Wilson, Carnegie Hall, 1987 \\\ Video still courtesy YouTube
There are moments in art when an artist transforms one thing into another, utterly broadening, deepening, and transmuting the original meaning. In this live version of “How Glad I Am,” her encore performance at the 1987 “Live at Carnegie Hall” performance, Wilson – a vocalist I listened to obsessively as a younger person – transforms a simple song between lovers into a rousing tribute from an artist to her audience. This performance is the most profoundly loving example I have witnessed of an artist speaking directly and forcefully to the mutuality between artists and audiences. And it’s become a kind of personal soundtrack when I’m walking through my life, especially my life as a poet and now as president. Often, when I’m among creatives, I hear Wilson’s gorgeous, gravely voice imploring: “you don’t know how glad I am [for you].”
RISD students \\\ Photo: Jo Sittenfeld
Listen, these young people at RISD and young creatives everywhere are our best-case scenario. They are our visionaries, if only we can amplify them, listen to them, and then get out of their way. They have all the love (and strategy and insight and knowledge) we need if we can help them wield it successfully. They have all the intelligence and ingenuity we need to help solve our challenges and advance what is good, right, and just among our species. Added to those attributes are other facts: they are funny and curious and eager to learn and gloriously unusual.
I watch them here at RISD in their multi-colored outfits, hair-dos, and platform shoes, giggling with each other in front of the snack machine or intensely applying their best thinking to each others’ work during critiques. I listen to them grappling with big ideas, considering, reconsidering, and redesigning our world as if on slant, eschewing the boxes into which we have crammed stale ideas that continue to guide our actions. And I watch them in their magnitude – in the more quotidian actions of their lives trudging up and down the severe hill outside with their humongous portfolios and unwieldy art projects, and think through it all, “Wow” and think “to be so young and so powerful and necessary” and think “thank God” and think “Thank you, young people, for saying yes to the impulse that brought you here.” Not only do they inspire me, they humble me and they – each one of them – feel like a balm, like hope incarnate.
Photo: Crystal Williams
My folks married in 1967 against all odds. They were of different ethnicities – he Black, she white. Different places – he from the Jim Crow South, she from Detroit, Michigan. Different eras – he born in 1907, she in 1936. Different careers – he a jazz musician and automotive foundry worker, she a public school teacher. And different educational backgrounds – he, we think, not a high school graduate, she a college graduate. And yet, they found each other over the keys of a piano and decided, against society’s cruel eye and hard palm, to love each other and to love me. I now understand the courage it took for all of that to be true, for them to make a way, for them to walk through the world in 1967 as a couple and with me as their child. That courage inspires me. Those decisions inspire me. They inspire me. Everyday. All day.
Kin by Crystal Williams, 2000 \\\ Williams utilizes memory and music as she lyrically weaves her way through American culture, pointing to the ways in which alienation, loss, and sensed “otherness” are corollaries of recent phenomena.
Lunatic: Poems by Crystal Williams, 2002 \\\ Williams confronts large-scale social and cultural events such as September 11, the death of Amadou Diallo, and the Chicago Race Riots in addition to exploring the often paralyzing terrain of loss, desire, and displacement. Among its most common themes is personal responsibility.
Troubled Tongues by Crystal Williams, 2009 \\\ In each of the three sections of this book is a prose poem meant to be read aloud in which a character, interacting with other characters, is named for a quality. They are Beauty, Happiness, and Patience.
Detroit as Barn: Poems by Crystal Williams, 2014
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In this gorgeous essay for Vittles, the poet Seán Hewitt recalls weekend nature walks in England and his grandfather’s lessons on the wonders of foraged food. Inspired by the abundant hawthorns in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Hewitt writes about making his own hawthorn gin.
When the hawthorns were all done and the gin was in the jar, I put it into the cupboard, then checked on it every week, turning it, watching the colours darken. Now I’ve learned to leave it in peace, and I don’t turn it that often anymore. I just bide my time until December when, on some foggy, cold evening – when it feels like winter has begun – I take it out of the cupboard.
The main difference between sloe and hawthorn gin is that, where sloe gin is fruity and sweet and mixes well with tonic or soda, hawthorn gin is like a dark sherry, perfect for winter. It has a velvety texture, a rich smoothness. I also like that, unlike sloe gin, you can’t buy it anywhere, so hawthorn gin becomes a secret, shared thing between friends, a preservation of summer pulled into winter.
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Long before the 1947 Roswell incident brought “little green men” into the public consciousness and prompted an explosion in UFO sightings, writers and scientists have speculated about the existence of life beyond our planet. H. G. Wells laid the groundwork for modern science fiction with novels like The War of the Worlds (1898), one of the first books to imagine an extraterrestrial invasion. Before Wells, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) sparked the imagination by discovering “canals” on Mars. But for the first recorded instance of humanity pondering the possibility of alien life, we have to go all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman times. In the first century B.C., Roman poet Lucretius wrote, “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beast.” Not exactly a controversial supposition; still, whether or not such tribes have come to our planet remains impossible to prove, and those who claim to have encountered alien beings have long been dismissed.
That said, in recent years, the concept of otherworldly visitors has begun to shift toward the mainstream. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the latest governmental entity devoted to investigating unexplained sightings. Even the term of choice, “UFO,” has given way to “UAP”—unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomenon. And just this June, former U.S. Air Force officer and intelligence official David Grusch claimed that the U.S. government had retrieved remains of several aircraft of “non-human” origin. The fallout from Grusch’s claims is yet to be determined—as is their veracity—but it seems likely that, in the end, the world will settle back into the binary of believers and skeptics, with no concrete evidence to settle the debate. Regardless of which camp you fall into, some of us will always look skyward with hope; we may never be able to scour the entirety of the universe, but it’s hard not to thrill to Lucretius’ logic. In the meantime, the longform articles collected here offer a fascinating glimpse into the UFO community and the stories that have shaped our modern understanding of the topic.
For me, what makes alleged alien encounter testimony so compelling is that—regardless of whether I believe the person’s interpretation of events—the incident had an undeniable and profound effect on their lives. This may not be true in every case, but even if you write off many accounts as delusion or whimsy or simply fiction, you’re still left with a legion of people who have been dramatically changed by their perceived experiences. It’s comforting to know, then, that for those such as Jason Guillemette, a character in this piece about amateur ufologists, communities exist where one can share their experiences without judgment.
In Guillemette’s case, that community is the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a non-profit, volunteer-run organization active in more than 40 countries—and one whose members are as rigidly skeptical as Guillemette. For most MUFON alumni, this is a quest for truth, not validation; members work rigorously to find earthly explanations for reported sightings. And as Badelt widens his scope to other folks in other organizations, you can’t help but be moved by people’s stories. After all, if you were to have a life-changing close encounter, with whom would you share that knowledge?
Most of the time, he’s able to find an explanation, he says. He often sends videos to other volunteers at MUFON who specialize in analyzing computer images. He refers to websites that track the flight patterns of satellites and planes and the International Space Station—the usual suspects when it comes to UFO sightings, he says. Guillemette described a recent case in which a couple reported seeing strange lights hovering above a nearby lake. The lights circled above the lake and then dropped down into the water, only to rise up a moment later and zip away. It turned out to be a plane, he says—filling up with water to fight a nearby forest fire. “Not everybody likes what we come up with,” he says, “but sometimes it’s really evident.”
The history of UFO sightings in New Zealand dates back to the early 20th century. It seems such a tranquil and unassuming country—cinematic hobbit history notwithstanding—which perhaps makes the events recounted here even more unsettling. These are all-too-human tales of altered lives. Some cases, such as that of Iris Catt, a self-proclaimed alien abductee whose nightmarish encounters go back to her childhood, are heartbreakingly tragic. Others follow more positive narratives, believing that aliens are beaming down rays of positivity and openness, gradually bringing humanity to a point where it is ready for formal communication.
When I was at university in the 1990s, “regression therapy” became big news, with countless stories of trauma-blocked memories and past-life remembrances unearthed through hypnosis. Just as suddenly, regression therapy drowned in a flood of peer-reviewed criticism, relegated to yet another pseudoscience. The concept never went away entirely and it pops up again in Vaughan Yarwood’s story, cautiously approved by academic institutions for its utility in specific circumstances. It’s complex territory, but Yarwood navigates it with clarity and sensitivity.
Iris Catt, a mild-mannered, unprepossessing woman in her 40s, then introduces herself. She is an abductee. It appears certain aliens have had their eye on her from an early age. She recounts her night horrors calmly, the way people do who have learned to accept their scars, to make their hurt and anguish a part of themselves.
“It is happening every day, and it is happening in New Zealand,” says Iris. “It is not going to go away. I truly believe that more and more people are beginning to remember what is happening to them because the time is getting closer when we are going to have to recognise that we are not the only intelligent form of life in the universe.”
Her audience understands. She is among friends.
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Edward Mack spent many years engaging with people who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, in the process becoming a pioneer in his field. Not surprisingly, he attracted resistance from the scientific community—less because of his work than because, over time, he came to the startling and highly controversial conclusion that a number of alleged abductees were telling the truth. Mack’s research may be little remembered by his profession at large, but his warmth, humanity, and faith continue to inspire hope in a small community that gathers annually in Rhode Island. They prefer the term “experiencer” to “abductee,” and in this Vanity Fair feature Ralph Blumenthal interweaves their stories with Mack’s.
For more about one of the characters in Blumenthal’s story, a 1994 feature in Omni details Linda’s alleged experience.
Once again, for me, the fascination of this piece lies in the stories of these everyday folks. To some degree, it doesn’t matter what they actually experienced. What counts, as Mack understood, is they have experienced something, and that something left a profound mark on their lives. In seeking to apply rigor and structure to the stories he was collecting, Mack plowed a hard path with poise and compassion. As this piece eloquently shows, his work was not in vain.
“Nothing in my nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me,” Mack later wrote in his 1994 best-seller, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. He had always assumed that anyone claiming to have been abducted by aliens was crazy, along with those who took them seriously. But here were people—students, homemakers, secretaries, writers, businesspeople, computer technicians, musicians, psychologists, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, a gas-station attendant—reporting experiences that Mack could not begin to fathom, things, he reflected, that by all notions of reality “simply could not be.”
I have long been fascinated with the so-called Wow signal, received in 1977 by Ohio University’s Big Ear radio telescope, which was then being used to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The tale of the signal makes for a great story in itself, but Keith Cooper’s piece sees that as merely a starting point. His narrative finds a central character in a man named Robert Gray: While the scientific community, including SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), gradually lowered the Wow signal to the status of “interesting curio,” Gray remained convinced that there was more to uncover.
Gray’s tenacity and belief in the face of mounting opposition is remarkable. Struggling for funding, unsuccessfully attempting to enlist help, and bartering for much-needed time on a limited number of radio telescopes, the frustrations he must have experienced make the twists in his story all the more poignant. Just when his enthusiasm began to wane, his work seemingly at a dead end, an exoplanet scientist reached out to Gray with a fresh idea, breathing new life into the man’s relentless quest. There is no neat, satisfying definitive end to this tale, but perhaps therein lies the true glory of Gray’s work. In the face of uncertainty, he carried on until the very end.
Nobody knows what the Wow signal was. We do know that it was not a regular astrophysical object, such as a galaxy or a pulsar. Curious the frequency that it was detected at, 1,420 MHz, is the frequency emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms in space, but it is also the frequency that scientists hunting for alien life listen to. Their reasoning is that aliens will supposedly know that astronomers will already be listening to that frequency in their studies of galactic hydrogen and so should easily detect their signal – or so the theory goes. Yet there was no message attached to the signal. It was just a burst of raw radio energy.
If SETI had a mythology, then the Wow signal would be its number one myth. And while it has never been forgotten by the public, the academic side of SETI has, by and large, dismissed it, quite possibly because it hasn’t been seen to repeat, and therefore cannot be verified—the golden rule of a successful SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) detection.
Celebrities who have copped to believing in UFOs are numerous enough to populate a listicle. Politicians? Not so much. Yet, the U.S. Congress’ House Oversight Committee has announced plans for a hearing regarding UAP reports, and if you trace the conversation back a few years, you’ll find that this shift is at least partly thanks to the protagonists in this story: former U.S. senator Harry Reid and Tom DeLonge, a founding member of pop-punk band Blink 182.
There’s a lot to digest here. It’s a wonderful example of hidden history: a small group of like-minded individuals working behind the scenes to advance their cause, with potentially wide-ranging repercussions. That history would be far less engaging, however, were it not for Tom DeLonge’s gregarious personality and indefatigable belief in alien visitors. His company, To The Stars, devotes considerable time and money to researching UAPs and extraterrestrial matters in general; Bryan Bender’s feature tells the story of how the singer managed to recruit experts and politicians to his cause.
Hanging on DeLonge’s wall was what might be considered the medals he’s collected in his struggle: a display case filled with dozens of commemorative coins from his meetings with generals, aerospace contractors and secret government agencies. They trace his visits to the CIA, to the U.S. Navy, to the “advanced development programs” division at Lockheed Martin’s famously secretive “Skunk Works” in Southern California, where some of the world’s most advanced spy planes were designed.
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Krista Stevens
In a decrepit house in São Paulo lives a woman who many people call a bruxa (the witch). As a blockbuster Brazilian podcast recently revealed, Margarida Maria Vicente de Azevedo Bonetti is wanted by U.S. authorities for her treatment of a maid named Hilda Rosa dos Santos, whom Margarida and her husband more or less enslaved in the Washington, D.C. area:
In early 1998—19 years after moving to the United States—dos Santos left the Bonettis, aided by a neighbor she’d befriended, Vicki Schneider. Schneider and others helped arrange for dos Santos to stay in a secret location, according to testimony Schneider later gave in court. (Schneider declined to be interviewed for this story.) The FBI and the Montgomery County adult services agency began a months-long investigation.
When social worker Annette Kerr arrived at the Bonetti home in April 1998—shortly after dos Santos had moved—she was stunned. She’d handled tough cases before, but this was different. Dos Santos lived in a chilly basement with a large hole in the floor covered by plywood. There was no toilet, Kerr, now retired, said in a recent interview, pausing often to regain her composure, tears welling in her eyes. (Renê Bonetti later acknowledged in court testimony that dos Santos lived in the basement, as well as confirmed that it had no toilet or shower and had a hole in the floor covered with plywood. He told jurors that dos Santos could have used an upstairs shower but chose not to do so.)
Dos Santos bathed using a metal tub that she would fill with water she hauled downstairs in a bucket from an upper floor, Kerr said, flipping through personal notes that she has kept all these years. Dos Santos slept on a cot with a thin mattress she supplemented with a discarded mat she’d scavenged in the woods. An upstairs refrigerator was locked so she could not open it.
“I couldn’t believe that would take place in the United States,” Kerr said.
During Kerr’s investigation, dos Santos recounted regular beatings she’d received from Margarida Bonetti, including being punched and slapped and having clumps of her hair pulled out and fingernails dug into her skin. She talked about hot soup being thrown in her face. Kerr learned that dos Santos had suffered a cut on her leg while cleaning up broken glass that was left untreated so long it festered and emitted a putrid smell.
She’d also lived for years with a tumor so large that doctors would later describe it variously as the size of a cantaloupe or a basketball. It turned out to be noncancerous.
She’d had “no voice” her whole life, Kerr concluded, “no rights.” Traumatized by her circumstances, dos Santos was “extremely passive” and “fearful,” Kerr said. Kerr had no doubt she was telling the truth. She was too timid to lie.
A work of absurdist art that entertains, but also carries a surprisingly grown-up message about taking responsibility for the state of our politics.
The post Derry Girls and the Absurdity of Adulthood appeared first on Public Books.
The spotlight belongs on Portia Control. For tonight’s final number, she takes the stage wearing the highest hair in recorded history. Her wigs are always an event, but this creation is most enthralling—a leaning tower three units tall, generous scoops of pistachio green. Loyal patrons of the bar brace for disaster, place their bets on whether the stacked wigs will fall. But Portia is no amateur. She works magic with spirit gum and bobby pins. Tonight, she is the fantasy, rhinestoned to death in her thrift store dress. No one can tell her otherwise.
The other queens are notorious outfit repeaters, worshippers of stretch fabric. They trot out their faithful standbys, the crowd-pleasing numbers they know will get wallets out of pockets. They don’t perform. They do laps around the bar, kissing cheeks, collecting dollar bills from drunk bachelorettes. At curtain call, they return to the stage a parade of half-drag. One of them, a newly minted queen whose name Portia has already forgotten, wears a T-shirt advertising the Iron Pit Gym—at curtain call!—and then the show hostess, a queen named Dawn Deveraux, emerges from backstage wearing flip-flops. It’s no wonder Dawn must remind the audience to applaud. On the mic, Dawn is a kindergarten teacher, pleading with her students to form a line. There are drink specials that Dawn needs to repeat—the vodka that nobody can stand is now only two dollars; Boozy Bottoms are half off—but the spotlight ignores Dawn and searches for Portia instead. Twenty minutes have passed since Portia’s last number, the one where she breathlessly lip-synced the side effects from a pharmaceutical commercial, and still the wigs sit heavy on her head, defying the laws of physics. Below the neck Portia wears a new look just for curtain call, a houndstooth overcoat the audience hasn’t seen before and will never see again.
After the curtain closes, the queens stream onto the dancefloor, choking the air with their department store perfumes. Portia cannot understand why these queens are treated as minor deities. Worshippers flock to them with offerings of well liquor and gas station cigarettes. Portia won’t accept such gifts. Her taste is far too particular. She drinks lemon drops out of champagne flutes. For her ceremonial post-show cigarette, she only smokes Fantasias, the luxury brand that comes in bright colors she can coordinate with her lip—cherry red, strawberry-milkshake pink. Any sensible queen knows that the performance doesn’t stop when you leave the stage. There is still an audience watching, even in the alley behind the bar, where Portia smokes next to the graffiti that reads BE GAY DO CRIME.
That’s where the new boy finds her, the new boy operating the spotlight. He has no theatrical experience, nor was he given any formal training, only this suggestion by Dawn an hour before the show began: “It’s a light. You take it, and you move it around.” But the spotlight moved of its own accord. The new boy swears this. The light is simply drawn to Portia.
She rewards the new boy for his flattery with a drag on her cigarette. Shivering in his corduroy jacket, he accepts readily, as if the cigarette might bring him warmth. “I’ve never done lights before,” he says. “Did I do okay?” His jacket has a fur collar, but in no way is it appropriate for winter. Portia feels a sudden motherly stirring. The jacket, she estimates, is at least a size too large for him. In the jacket, he looks like a child playing in Daddy’s closet.
“You were pretty good for a virgin,” Portia says.
A new song starts playing inside the Closet, the bump and grind favorite that comes on every Friday and Saturday when the party reaches its peak. The throb of bass is so heavy it shakes the whole block. “I bet the twinks are going wild in there,” she says. “Sucking down their vodka sodas. What is it about being skinny and hairless that makes you order vodka soda?”
The new boy laughs. “I love your name, by the way,” he says. “So funny. Portia Control! I kept cracking up.”
“Why?” she says. “What’s funny about it?”
“It’s. Ummm.”
“It’s what?” She takes pleasure in watching him squirm. She is having fun with this new boy. They are having fun together, both of them.
“Well,” he says, “uh, you know—”
“I’m kidding,” she says. “I’m messing with you. Yes, I’m a big girl. That’s the joke.”
“It’s hard to tell. If you guys are joking.”
“Guys?”
“Ladies. Gorgeous ladies.”
“That’s better.”
Holiday lights twinkle down where the alley meets College Ave. Christmas is over—New Year’s, too—but the city is in no rush to put away its decorations, and while some people might find this tacky, Portia can appreciate it. What’s so wrong with keeping that festive mood going long enough to see them through the winter?
She realizes she is staring at the new boy’s jaw, the empty threat of his stubble. For how long has she been staring? She can’t remember. She says, “Have you ever thought about doing drag? You have the face for it.”
“Yeah?”
“Cheekbones,” Portia says, “are very important.”
The new boy considers this. He finds a wall to lean against, strikes a pose that says I, an intellectual, am considering cheekbones. To complete the look, he takes a long drag on her cigarette. The smoldering end burns red, burns orange, bright bursts of color in the January gray. “Your name’s Dustin, right?” he says.
“I’m Portia,” she says.
“Yeah, but like, your actual name.”
“I don’t do government names. I hear that enough out in the real world. Don’t make me live in the real world any more than I already have to.”
The new boy takes one last sip of the cigarette. “I’m Miguel,” he says, and passes it back to her, but the greedy little thing has left her nothing but ash.
She invites him over to keep her company while she does her stoning for tomorrow night’s show. It’s a long and lonely process, applying rhinestones to fabric, but just how long she keeps to herself. She does, however, issue the requisite warning about the E6000 fumes upon their arrival at her apartment. She believes those fumes have mind-altering properties. You have to take a break every hour or so, step away from the glue and fill up on fresh air.
At Portia’s apartment, overhead light is forbidden, its cruelty toward drag queens well-documented. Lamplight is kinder, more flattering, and a lamp is yet another object Portia can adorn with fringe and beads. To someone who has never stoned before, her apartment with its low light and scattered syringes probably looks like the den of a heroin addict, but the truth is much sadder—she’s a drag queen who buys secondhand and spangles every garment herself. Portia visits the women’s section at Vintage Wearhouse so often that the cashier who merely cocked his eyebrows at her selections in the beginning has started asking questions. Her answer is always that she’s shopping for her homebound mother, her poor mother who likes to dress up in the mirror because it makes her feel alive.
“And he believes that?” Miguel says.
“People like him will believe anything,” she says, “as long as they don’t have to believe queers exist.”
Anyway, Vintage Wearhouse is a crapshoot. Only sometimes is their selection worth the homophobia. Where Portia most reliably strikes gold is estate sales. None of the other queens at the Closet will shop a dead woman’s wardrobe. They find the practice morbid; they prefer to sew their four-way stretch swimsuits and serve the same look week after week. Portia’s standards are higher. Whenever a big girl croaks, Portia is there to rifle through her closet. That’s how she found the houndstooth coat, the coat. Does Miguel remember it? Of course he remembers it; Portia says so before he has the chance to respond. Even if her haul is not up to par, even if she comes home from a sale with trash, it doesn’t matter. Portia knows how to make trash look good.
Miguel is newly twenty-one, a student at the university enrolled in a full slate of business classes. Majoring in business—that was his dad’s idea, he says, not his. It is the most essential of the strings attached to his dad’s offer to help pay his tuition. His dad works in landscaping. He and a team of four other brown men are shuttled around the Indianapolis suburbs in the back of a pickup truck to plant flowers for white people with money to burn. This has been his father’s workday for nearly twenty years now. Miguel will make something more of himself—thus, business! Miguel will not spend his life down on his knees.
“Your dad is right,” Portia says. “I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life on my knees, and I regret every minute of it.”
“Ha ha,” Miguel says.
“Does he know?”
“About what?”
“Your appreciation of artisanal meats.”
“I think so. But if I don’t say it out loud, we can go on pretending. And as long as we keep pretending, he’ll keep covering tuition.”
“So this is a long con,” Portia says. “You’re scamming him. Look, as a rule, I respect the hustle, but in this instance, I’m not sure.”
“It’s not a scam.”
“Sounds like one to me.”
“A degree in business can take you anywhere.” Look how precious he is, trying to believe his own line. He gnaws on the skin around his thumbnail, his teeth as square as a woodland creature’s.
“The longer you put off telling him,” Portia says, “the harder it’s going to be. I’ll just say that.”
“Thanks for your input,” Miguel says, “but it’s fine. I’ll be fine, Mom.”
“Not Mom. I’m not that old yet.”
“Tell that to your hairline,” he says quietly, as if already apologizing for it.
Here is a lesson Portia learned years ago—you can get away with being rude and nasty if there’s a twinkle in your eye. Miguel’s eye has no such twinkle.
“Was that okay to say?” he says. “Your hairline really isn’t that crazy.”
“Oh, stop. No backpedaling!” She gives him full permission to read her into the dirt. Nothing is off-limits, save for her government name, which is not to be repeated. “So,” she says, “where were we? My hairline. Go on. Destroy me.”
He needs to know the backstage gossip if he’s going to work with the queens up close. Has he heard about the amateur porn? The oldest queen at the Closet makes amateur porn with her two mustachioed lovers. She is the cabaret singer, the queen with the terrible, caked-on makeup. Miguel nods as in yes, the terrible one, I remember. You can look up the terrible one on PornHub, where she and her Super Mario boyfriends have a decent following. Portia can show him right now if he wants.
“I think I’m good,” he says.
“Oh, it’s hilarious,” Portia says. “I’ll send you a link. Homework for next time.”
The biggest story is Dawn, the show hostess. Dawn is mother to nearly a dozen Deveraux girls, several of whom—this is not to be repeated—have sucked her toes in exchange for bookings. Dawn is going through a divorce and milking it for all it’s worth. The divorce is her excuse for repeating stale material on the mic: I’m a little distracted right now. Maybe you heard? Miguel should avoid friending her on Facebook, where she posts only photos from the latest furry convention or mopey updates about how quiet her house is now. Never mind that Dawn was out on the dance floor every Saturday night slobbering all over some local twink, back when things at home were bliss. These days she hovers near the bar after her shows, collecting pity drinks. Meanwhile, her husband—“A total sweetheart,” Portia says, “he worshipped her, the dumb fuck”—has been banned from entering the Closet ever again. Dawn made sure of it.
Miguel says, “Is that true about Dawn’s toes? You’re for real?”
“Oh yes,” Portia says. “Those little piggies get around.”
“That’s nasty.”
“Foot stuff isn’t nasty. Dawn is nasty. Let’s get that much straight. We don’t kink-shame in this house.”
He asks her what his drag name is. He does not ask what his drag name might be or could be. In Miguel’s mind, it seems, there is a right answer, one that Portia is uniquely qualified to intuit. And perhaps she is. Portia will play the role of drag prophet. She will do her best to communicate with the showgirl in his subconscious.
“Her name is Chiquita,” Portia says. “Like the banana.” For her signature number, Chiquita would do a bit of burlesque in a yellow dress with marabou trimming. The dress would be built to be torn away; it would peel in four different places: neck, shoulder, back, shoulder. Portia points to those places on her body, miming a little striptease.
Miguel objects to this moniker. The name, the whole concept—it all sounds like a crude stereotype to him, the exotic Latina covered in fruit.
“That’s drag, babe,” Portia says. “Stereotypes and stupidity. You have to own it. You take the dumb shit people say to you, and you wear it like armor.” She has been stoning her gown, her armor, for hours now, an effort she can count in calluses. The night has slipped away, and light begins to filter through her velveteen curtains. Still, the garment barely glimmers.
She asks Miguel if he has any advice for her on how to manage her money, and he says, “You’re a drag queen, you don’t have any money,” which stings, but it’s the truth. In the daytime, Portia works at a cellphone store, convincing townies to upgrade to unlimited plans they don’t need. She won’t tell Miguel which store it is; Portia isn’t meant to be seen in the world of strip malls. She makes decent money in the realm of lanyards and slacks, but that income goes to her drag closet. Portia is a costly venture that has not yet yielded profit. Portia is a long-term investment.
“In other words, you’re going to be broke for a while,” Miguel says. Nothing wrong with that. Miguel is, too. For months he had a steady gig working the line at Build-a-Bowl, but just after New Year’s, Miguel showed up five minutes late to a lunch shift, and his manager told him he should go home and reflect on his issues with authority. In his file—this mythical file, often referred to yet never seen—there are multiple strikes against him, complaints describing him as uncooperative and lazy. So claims the day manager. All the managers there are white. Everybody else who works there is white, actually, and none of them have ever been told they have an attitude problem. Only Miguel.
“That place is fucked up,” he says. “A Philly cheesesteak bowl, that is such a fucked-up concept. But the tips are good. The tips are so good, you don’t even know.”
“Tips are great,” Portia says, “but let’s not neglect the shaft.”
“Um, yeah.”
“I was trying to make a joke.”
“I’m describing racism. What about that is funny to you?”
“I believe you were describing a Philly cheesesteak.”
“Fuck off,” he says, but actually, this is her house, so if anything, he should be the one to fuck off. He shifts in his chair like he is signaling his intention to leave. He slides an arm into a jacket sleeve, but slowly, tentatively, a burlesque in reverse. She suspects he’s bluffing. In the event that he isn’t, certainly he has fumbled the opportunity to make an impactful exit.
“Sorry,” Portia says. “I guess the joke didn’t land.”
“I’d like to speak to whoever cleared it for takeoff,” Miguel says.
The next night, they show up to the Closet together an hour before showtime. Portia carries her triple-stack wig on a mannequin head. Miguel, ever the gentleman, lugs Portia’s suitcase, which is no easy feat. The suitcase weighs at least thirty pounds. It is packed with her costumes for the night—a different outfit for each of her numbers, and of course, a last look for curtain call that is stoned within an inch of its life.
Outside the bar, stationed as close to the entrance as is legally possible, is a street evangelist in a crisp white polo, his flesh pink and wet like smoked ham. This man has been accosting the queens for years, condemning them to hell for as long as Portia has been doing drag. A venue will close, a new one will pop up in its place, and Mr. Ham will be there to let them know that they are sluts, they are whores, they are Satan’s foot soldiers in the cosmic war between good and evil. Tonight, as Portia and Miguel roll past, he barks, “Abomination! God sees this perversion and frowns upon you.”
Portia says, “I like to think so,” and blows the man a little kiss.
Miguel scurries along like a frightened rabbit. To him, the man’s words strike like hate, but Portia doesn’t see it that way. For a man to inquire about the state of her soul and not the state of her hole—that’s love, she says. Anyway, hate and love, they’re both expressions of passion, aren’t they? Portia is blessed to have the most passionate fans in the world.
She arrives at the bar in full face. It isn’t like TV, the queens getting ready together backstage, painting their faces at a row of identical vanities. No—there is room enough for only one mirror, and that mirror belongs to Dawn. The position of show hostess comes with certain perks.
Backstage, Dawn is scrolling through Grindr, dragging French fries through ketchup. “Love your new puppy,” she says to Portia. “You’ve trained him well. All that’s missing is the leash.” She taps a ketchupy fry on her fast-food wrapper like she is stubbing out a cigarette. Dawn wears athletic shorts and a tank top so distressed it looks like a pillowcase. Only Dawn’s face is ready for the stage, and even that, Portia thinks, is debatable. Dawn’s makeup is spray-tan orange. She has carrot undertones.
“Thanks,” Portia says. “He’s a rescue.”
“Who rescued who?” Dawn says.
“Me, obviously. I rescued him.”
Dawn puts down her phone, looks to Miguel. “We’re paying you to run lights,” she says. “You know you don’t have to hang around her, right? It’s not your job.” She chomps a fistful of fries, waiting for him to say something.
What he says is: “I need a drink.” He excuses himself, leaving Portia and Dawn alone backstage.
“Portia Control,” Dawn says, “corrupting America’s youth.” She unzips a garment bag to reveal the same lemon-lime swimsuit she wore last Saturday and the Saturday before.
“He’s a sweet kid,” Portia says. “He just needs some guidance.”
“Just fuck him already,” Dawn says, “and be done with it. That’s what this is all about, right?”
Portia’s showstopper tonight is another estate sale gem—a boatneck dress in Scotch tape tartan, hunter green and navy blue. Draped across her shoulders is a burnt orange boa that curls like a telephone cord all the way down to the sticky bar floor. What is the mood tonight out in the crowd? Portia can’t tell if they want what she’s giving. Perhaps she is stiffer than usual now that she knows who wields the spotlight. But why should that matter? She lip-syncs to a mix of rants by unruly drive-through customers, and the tips are meaningful but sparse. Some nights, she tells herself, she cannot grab the Top 40 crowd. Some nights she is only for the enlightened few.
She leaves the stage before her mix is over. Portia is not a showboat; she is not desperate to soak up every last drop of the audience’s adulation. Backstage, congratulatory messages wait for her on her phone. Miguel, who is out operating the spotlight, has sent a series of gushing texts, along with many exclamation points. KILLED IT!!! HOW ARE DAWN’S TOES TASTING BACK THERE?
SALTY, Portia replies.
After the show, she takes him to the bar to do celebratory shots of Fireball. He asks what they are celebrating, and she says, “Do we need an occasion?”
On the dancefloor, they dance close enough that it’s obvious they are there together, but not so close that they could be mistaken for anything more than friends. Portia is not wooing him; that is not happening. Miguel, baby-faced Miguel, has been of legal drinking age for how long? Less than a year, certainly. Meanwhile, Portia has been perfecting her drinking for the last decade. Portia is a nightlife professional. She has no business rooting around in this boy’s cellar or letting this boy root around in hers.
Miguel, bless him, has no rhythm. He closes his eyes when he dances, flinging his arms and doing a sorry step-touch. It’s almost cute, Portia thinks. The bump and grind song, the song, is up next. People scream for it; they love the song so much. The song hasn’t even started yet, not really—that familiar synth bassline is only just creeping into the mix—but people are already pressing their bodies against each other and thrusting dramatically to the beat they know is coming.
“I gotta take a piss,” Miguel says.
“How very macho,” Portia says.
“Did you want to come with?”
“You’re a big boy. I think you can manage.”
“Are we going to make out tonight?”
She considers his lips, cracked and peeling, crying out for a coat of ChapStick. “No,” she says, “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, right. Because I’m just your fucking dog.”
“That was a joke.”
“Yeah, and it’s sooo funny.”
“It is,” she says. “It can be if you’ll laugh about it. Drink some water.”
“Okay, Mom.”
He leaves, and she is alone in the pink club light, surrounded by theatre majors doing the choreography from a pop star’s Vegas residency. Then he fights his way back through the arms and elbows, returning to their spot not with water but with drinks.
“Thank you,” she says, and gives him a pat on the head. “Good dog.”
“What?”
His drink of choice is some ungodly mix of peppermint schnapps and white chocolate, the sort of drink only a rookie goes for, a drink where the burn is disguised by sweetness.
Louder now, so he can hear her over the music: “All I said was thank you.”
“You’re lying.”
She says, “I’m lightening the mood.”
“You’re not, though. You literally are not.”
Portia can’t see his face. The blurry disco lighting at the Closet gets blurrier the more you drink, yet less flattering. Everything looks smudged. “Don’t be so sensitive,” she says. “You’re making it into something way too serious. We’re just cutting up. We’re having a good time.”
As is tradition at the Closet, the DJ starts playing “Last Dance” by Donna Summer to let patrons know the bar will soon be closing. Over their heads, the disco ball stops turning, but the crowd continues dancing as if the night will not end.
“You are such bullshit,” Miguel says.
“It doesn’t matter,” Portia says.
“What doesn’t?”
“What you think.”
The lights come up. The spell is broken. She can see him clearly now—how sweaty he is, how small.
He says, “The audacity to come out here tonight with this crunchy wig. That took guts.”
“You don’t know anything about anything,” she says.
“I know your shit is fucked up.”
“You run lights. You’re nothing.”
“Right,” he says, “I’m nothing.”
“You are. We all know this business school nonsense is a joke. Come summertime, you’ll be riding around in the back of a truck with dear old dad.”
“Bitch.”
“I am,” she says. “A musty old bitch. You didn’t know?”
“Oh, everybody knows, Dustin. It’s actually kind of sad. You come out and do your little skit, and the whole bar takes a cigarette break. A bathroom break. No one wants to look at you.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m buzzed.”
“You need to eat something.”
“I could keep going.”
The bar staff turn chairs over, recite their mantra to the patrons still lingering on the dancefloor: “Love you, but go the fuck home.” There is something shameful about seeing this space so brightly lit, Portia thinks. In the dark, the dancefloor bursts with possibility, then the light comes on and exposes everything for exactly what it is.
Portia offers Miguel a ride home, which he declines. “I’ll walk,” he says, “I love walking,” and then he trips over an object that only he can see.
“Why don’t you let me take care of you tonight,” Portia says. This is more announcement than question.
They drive through Rally’s on the way back to her apartment—it’s the only restaurant still open at this time of night. Miguel protests; somebody told Miguel once that they found a fly in their burger here. “It’s four in the morning,” Portia says. “Lower your standards.” They order off the value menu, value cheeseburgers and value tenders and value fries, whatever sounds good. Does Miguel want the cinnamon apple pie? Portia will buy him the cinnamon apple pie. “I don’t want the cinnamon apple pie,” Miguel says. “Jesus.”
“Cancel the pie,” Portia tells the illuminated menu.
He makes a show of not speaking to her. An admirable effort, a fine performance, but isn’t that his hand in the Rally’s bag, searching for fries? Back at the apartment, she fluffs him a pillow, drapes him in the softest blanket she can find, and still he commits to the bit, horizontal on her futon.
Other priorities spring to mind, priorities that are not Miguel. Water, for one—she goes to fetch water, and perhaps an aspirin. It is imperative that Portia stays awake long enough to sober up. If she falls asleep now, she’ll pay for it in the morning. She can’t bounce back like Miguel can. For her, the carriage will be a pumpkin again soon enough.
The faucet runs. She makes herself keep drinking despite the sour taste on her tongue. On her phone, she finds a text from Dawn: 2 BOTTOMS DON’T MAKE A TOP…
Portia types her reply: LOVE FINDS A WAY. Then, because it’s Dawn: LOSE THIS NUMBER.
The next morning, it’s afternoon. Miguel is gone, the blanket folded into a perfect little square.
She isn’t interested in staging a reality TV reunion episode about it. They don’t need to rehash last night’s stale drama, do they? She goes out to Vintage Wearhouse to find something his size. Lucky her, she ends up finding a gown with serious potential, and on top of that, a ridiculous fuck-off hat straight out of My Fair Lady. Who, she wonders, would give these treasures away to a thrift store like they’re nothing? The hat looks like an elaborate birthday cake. The gown is studded with blue raindrops. Portia brings her discoveries up to the checkout counter, and the cashier says, “Your mom’s lost a lot of weight, huh?”
“These aren’t for my mom,” Portia says. “These are for my gay lover.”
“I knew you were some kind of fag,” he says.
“Incredible detective work,” she says, “truly. Now ring up my items, please. I’m a fag on the go.”
Miguel would rather not see her. He makes that clear. She calls him, and he says, “So now you’re calling me?”
“Yes, I’m calling you,” she says.
“I’ll pay you back for the food.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“What do you want from me, then?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I don’t want anything. I found something in the back of my closet. A gown.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“It doesn’t fit me,” she says, “not anymore, but I think it would fit you perfectly. Can I convince you to come try it on?”
He wants to know what the occasion is. There is no occasion. The gown is the occasion.
The story of last night is that he wants nothing to do with Portia, yet here he is at her kitchen table, his face so close to hers she can feel his breath hot on her cheek. It’s bad luck to try on drag without lashes and lipstick, Portia says. 301s and a cherry lip—those are nonnegotiable.
Miguel is not shy. He undresses when she asks him to undress. She watches his clothes collect on her living room carpet—the corduroy jacket with the fur collar; the unreasonably baggy jeans that make it look like he has no ass whatsoever. Now that he has stripped down to his tiny red briefs, she can finally confirm an ass is there. A pair of legs is connected to it.
“Yeah, I have chicken legs,” Miguel says. “Don’t make fun of them.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” Portia says.
“Literally all you do is roast people.”
“Only the people I like.”
“Is that how it works?”
He steps into the raindrop gown, and she zips him, her thumb tracing a delicate line up his back.
The hat is a little much on him, though that does not surprise her. A hat like that—frills and netting and polka dots—you have to wear with intention. But the gown. He needs hips, that much is a given, but already, he is a confection. Of this she is certain. “Walk around a little,” she says. “See how you like it.” Miguel is a terror, clomping around in her heels. He is a tornado, ripping his path through her kitchen. But look—he shimmers any way the light hits him. The gown she bought is covered in stones, hundreds of them. In the gown he is so bright and so brilliant, Portia can only have a glimpse of him before she has to look away.
***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen
Education bill to require two-thirds of content for standard bachelor’s degrees to be in Dutch
As Britain voted to leave the EU, Dutch universities began offering more courses in English and foreigners streamed in.
But with 122,287 international students in higher education in the Netherlands – 15% of all the country’s students – the government is proposing a cap on the number of students from outside the European Economic Area in some subjects and forcing universities to offer at least two-thirds of the content of standard bachelor’s degrees in Dutch, unless a university justifies an exemption.
Continue reading...Graduates now owe an average amount of £45,000, Student Loans Company figures have revealed
Outstanding student loans in England have surpassed £200bn for the first time – 20 years earlier than previous government forecasts, as the number of students at universities continues to outstrip expectations.
The Student Loans Company (SLC), which administers tuition and maintenance loans in England, said that the balance of government-backed loans reached £205bn in the current academic year, including £19bn worth of new loans to undergraduates. The figure has doubled in just six years. It reached more than £100bn in 2016-17 after the coalition government decided to increase undergraduate tuition fees from £3,600 a year to £9,000 in 2012.
Continue reading...Marie Widengård looks to critical border studies to understand how both extraction and conservation are at work in a contested area of Jamaica.
The post Saving the Forest to Secure the Mine in Jamaica’s Cockpit Country appeared first on Edge Effects.
After women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen was mobbed and assaulted in New Zealand, longtime feminist and socialist Jill Ovens decided she’d had enough. The following week, Jill resigned from the Labour Party and founded the Women’s Rights Party, which states, on their website:
“We want a world that is safe and fair for women and girls
The Women’s Rights Party is a party of women and men who believe in democracy, equality, and biological reality.
Sex is binary
Human beings cannot change sex
Women are adult humans of the female sex”
Jill had been an active member of the Labour Party but had become increasingly angered as women’s voices were not being listened to. Since retiring from the union movement, she has thrown her energy into the Women’s Rights Party, which has set out to recruit 500 members so they can register as a political party and be on the ballot in the New Zealand General Election in October.
The Women’s Rights Party aims to give women an option on the ballot paper who
find themselves politically homeless as mainstream parties have stopped listening to women and their concerns. In addition to contesting Parliamentary and local body elections, they hope to influence cross party policies to promote and uphold the rights and status of women and girls.
In this episode, I speak with Jill about her political history and why she formed the Women’s Rights Party.
The post Jill Ovens resigned from New Zealand’s Labour Party to start the Women’s Rights Party appeared first on Feminist Current.
If you’re already familiar with my work, then you know I do Black feminist sociology that draws on Black feminist thought as conceptual framework for the mixed methods study of digital society. In this blog post, I want to discuss one of the predecessors of the field: Black sociology.
Black sociology analyzes society from the standpoint of Black people to highlight how historical social structures affect them today. It offers a non-eurocentric perspective to address the interrelatedness of racial and economic inequality affecting society, making its practitioners scholar-activists who bridge the gap between academia and the masses. White sociology contradicts its purported tenets of humanism and objectivity through anti-Black scientific racism that manufactures claims of racial inferiority to justify subordination. In contrast, Black sociology argues the social problems Black people experience, such as higher rates of poverty or lower rates of educational attainment, are indicative of the interdependency between racism and capitalism.
This framework seems poignant at a time when state and local governments across the United States aim to eliminate the presence of Black intellectual thought from the halls of academia. For this reason, this blog post explores the historical roots, evolution, key figures, and current state of Black sociology as a field.
From the very beginning, Black scholars have navigated sociological negation characterized by varying patterns of exclusion that can be summed up in three distinct periods: exclusion and segregation (1895-1930), accommodation and assimilationism (1931-1964), and co-optation and containment (1965-Present). These periods also produced three distinct groups of Black sociologists respectively: the Beginning School, the New School, and the New Black Sociologists. Contra to notions of liberalism rife within sociology, the experiences of Black sociologists throughout indicate they have consistently faced persist oppression and racism.
In 1895, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois earned the first Ph.D. awarded to a Black person from Harvard University from the Department of History. Despite this disciplinary background, he is now widely considered a founding father of sociology. Consequently, the awarding of his degree is considered the genesis of Black people’s involvement in sociology. Du Bois used his training to research the lives of Black people in America as did several other early Black sociologists, including George E. Haynes, Richard R. Wright Jr., and Kelly Miller. Anti-Black racism from white sociologists fostered academic segregation within the profession, making it difficult for their contributions to be recognized and acknowledged.
The New School of Black sociologists was initiated by DuBois and developed by E. Franklin Frazier, Charles S. Johnson, and others. Through applied research and social reform orientation, they drew on prevailing sociological methods on the immediate effects of urbanization, integration, rural poverty, and segregation on the Black community. Yet, they still faced racism including having their work labeled propaganda and other discriminatory practices. Their inclusion necessitated adhering to positivism to compete for rewards that were often defined by standards of the white dominant group. Despite this challenge, they performed social science research as a form of protest. Thus, they had to balance advocating for freedom, justice, and Black people while also submitting themselves to standards of merit based on research principles defined according to white norms.
The New Black Sociologists experienced increased professional visibility due to racial integration, which has also drained Black institutions and threatens their existence and that of the Black sociological tradition dependent upon them. In integrated spaces, a caucus structure often constrains Black sociology, leaving little promise of parity while it dismantles the Black sociological tradition. Additionally, predominantly white universities often hire a token number of Black sociologists solely as race relations experts, which negates the diversity of Black intellectual traditions. Into the present day, whiteness defines the substance and epistemology of sociology.
Overall, the historical roots of Black sociology created a framework of social science based on self-definition and self-determination that reinforces Black identity. Still, the dynamics of negation from the broader discipline create a precarious reality for a tradition that rejects its scientific racism.
The evolution of Black sociology has been shaped by an extension beyond the study of race to incorporate intersectionality; an emphasis on social justice and activism; and an incorporation of diverse perspectives, methodologies, and approaches rooted in the standpoint of Black people. Black sociology continues to amplify marginalized voices and expand our understanding of power, resistance, and liberation
The framework of Black sociology has evolved due to the transformative role of intersectionality, particularly in the field of Black feminist sociology. The paradigm highlights the interconnectedness of race, gender, and other social identities in shaping the social inequalities that affect individuals’ experiences. This concept also expands Black sociology beyond the single-axis framework of racism to explore the complexity of multiple systems of oppression intersecting and mutually reinforcing each other. Black feminist sociology therefore deepens our understanding by providing a more nuanced analysis of power, inequality, and resistance in society.
Black sociology’s evolution also includes a growing emphasis on social justice and activism. By emphasizing the link between theory and praxis, this emphasis fosters transformative research agendas, community engagement, and collective resistance in pursuit of liberation and Black self-determination. Based on this activist-theorist orientation, Black sociologists have also challenged traditional notions of objectivity and neutrality in sociological research, arguing these ideals often serve to perpetuate the status quo. Instead, they advocate for a more applied approach to research that acknowledges how Black social scientists develop interpretations rooted in their experience of oppression. This approach therefore acknowledges the importance of centering the voices and experiences of marginalized communities, rather than relying on dominant sociological interpretations about how race relates to social inequalities.
The field of Black also evolved through the incorporation of perspectives such as critical race theory, which provides nuanced understandings of power relations and racial inequality. Adopting such frameworks enables it to challenge dominant narratives and foster a more comprehensive understanding of social phenomena. Such a liberatory approach to sociology develops new areas of research, such as Black feminist digital sociology, which studies of digital technologies and their impact on Black social life primarily from the perspective of Black women.
W.E.B DuBois’s study of race and social inequality in The Souls of Black Folk provides the groundwork of the sociological examination of Black American life as conceptualized by his theory of double consciousness. Double consciousness describes the social psychological experience of Black Americans who must constantly navigate between their own cultural identity and the norms of a white-dominated society. In addition to DuBois, numerous scholars have done work that exemplifies Black sociology, but I will focus on three: Oliver Cromwell Cox, Orlando Patterson, and Patricia Hill Collins.
I chose Oliver Cromwell Cox because I intend to delve deeper into Black sociology from the Caribbean perspective in my future writing. Cox was born in August 1901 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He moved to the United States during his childhood and later received degrees in economics and sociology from the University of Chicago, including a Ph.D. in Sociology in August 1938. Cox went on to teach at Wiley College, Tuskegee Institute, Wayne State University, and Lincoln University.
Cox’s scholarship primarily challenged dominant theories of race relations from a diasporic perspective that recognized the interrelations of racism and capitalism. He rejected biological determinism, instead arguing that race was a social construction of the power relations of a white supremacist society. His writing also characterized racism as the foundation of the capitalism system and that this system had global implications. Cox’s most influential works include Caste, Class, and Race; Capitalism as a System and Foundations of Capitalism. Overall, Oliver Cromwell Cox’s contributions to sociology have been invaluable in advancing our understanding of race relations both in the United States and globally.
Orlando Patterson, born in Westmoreland, Jamaica, is another Caribbean sociologist whose work has contributed heavily to Black sociology. He studied economics at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica before completing his doctorate in sociology at the London School of Economics, where he graduated in 1962. He has served as faculty at both schools and now works at Harvard University as the John Cowles Professor of Sociology since 1971.
Patterson’s scholarship challenges mainstream sociological theories of racial relations through an emphasis on the impact of slavery on contemporary society. His seminal work published in 1982, Slavery and Social Death, argues slavery was both a social and economic insinuation that profoundly shaped the lives of enslaved people and their descendants. Other publications include Freedom in the Making of Western Culture; Modern Trafficking, Slavery, and Other Forms of Servitude; and The Ordeal of Integration. In addition to his rigorous research and insightful analysis, Patterson co-founded Cultural Survival, which demonstrates his commitment to social justice for all indigenous people of the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
Born in May 1948, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Patricia Hill Collins is one of the founders of the field of Black feminist sociology. She earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Brandeis University in 1969. Her academic journey continued at Harvard University, where she completed her master’s degree in teaching in 1970. After a career in education, Collins returned to Brandeis where she completed a Ph.D. in 1984. Collins’s career as faculty include the University of Cincinnati and the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is now Distinguished University Professor Emerita.
One of the key contributions of Collins’s work is her exploration of the concept of the matrix of domination. The groundbreaking work Black Feminist Thought uses this concept within sociological research to illuminate the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in an investigation of the unique experiences of Black women. Additionally, Collins’s scholarship has also explored the importance of Black feminist activism and community organizing as tools for social change in movements for justice and liberation.
Currently, the field of Black sociology faces several challenges that affect scholars within the discipline. Despite progression, Black sociologists remain underrepresented in academic spaces and receive less recognition for their contributions to the field. Their careers often encounter barriers such as limited access to resources, scholarly networks, and funding opportunities due to biased evaluation criteria. Moreover, the eurocentric quality of white sociology undervalues the experiences and perspectives of marginalized communities, particularly Black people.
Nevertheless, Black sociology remains a crucial component of the discipline due to how it continues to center the experiences and perspectives of the African diaspora. Centering Black people in sociological analysis enables a more comprehensive understanding of social dynamics and power structures. Furthermore, this approach also cultivates more inclusive and equitable approaches to the social sciences. Should the academic racism Black sociologists navigate ever got resolved, the field of Black sociology can actively contribute to dismantling systemic inequalities and fostering social justice.
By centering the experiences and perspectives of Black people, Black sociology challenges dominant explanations of societal phenomena. It addresses the interrelatedness of racism and capitalism affecting the experiences of Black Americans to emphasize social justice and activism guided by a paradigm of intersectionality.
Key figures in the field, such as W.E.B Du Bois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Orlando Patterson, and Patricia Hill Collins, have made significant contributions to our understanding of how social systems such as racism and capitalism affect the experiences of Black people. Still, Black sociology continues to face challenges, including underrepresentation and the undervaluing of marginalized communities’ perspectives. Despite these challenges, Black sociology remains a crucial area of the discipline.
To learn more, check out the hyperlinks in the essay above.
The post Black Sociology:Race and Power Dynamics in Society appeared first on Blackfeminisms.com.
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A nice bit of Brown University history after graduation weekend. The first university president’s house was built in 1770 and by 1840 it had been moved and a new house built– the current house at Brown and Power is the 4th according to the Encyclopedia Brunonia. Among early images of the university, this needlework by Polly Turner, a student at Mary Balch’s school, is my favorite. Balch’s students’ samplers are renowned among collectors and scholars. Her school was at 22 George Street, just down the hill from the library where I work, in a home that was cleared by the mid-19th century to make way for the Dorrance mansion (now Wilbour Hall).
Polly Turner chose to profile the president’s house in a glorious burst of color and careful needlework. “Honour and Renown Will the Ingenous Crown,” she heads the piece. The sampler is in the collection at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, which has a short blog about it here.
The post Brown University Stitched, c 1786 appeared first on Karin Wulf.
Guest post by Sabine Carey, Marcela Ibáñez, and Eline Drury Løvlien
On April 10, 1998, various political parties in Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and the Republic of Ireland signed a peace deal ending decades of violent conflict. Twenty-five years later, the Good Friday Agreement remains an example of complex but successful peace negotiations that ended the conflict era known as The Troubles.
Since the agreement, Northern Ireland has experienced a sharp decline in violence. But sectarian divisions continue as a constant feature in everyday life. Peace walls remain in many cities, separating predominantly Catholic nationalists from predominantly Protestant unionist and loyalist neighborhoods. Brexit and the Northern Ireland protocol increased tensions between the previously warring communities, leading to an upsurge in sectarian violence, which has been a great cause of concern.
In March 2022, we conducted an online survey to understand attitudes toward sectarianism among Northern Ireland’s adult population. Our results show that sectarianism continues to impact perceptions and attitudes in Northern Ireland. The continued presence of paramilitaries is still a divisive issue that follows not just sectarian lines but also has a strong gender component.
Our findings show that the pattern of who identifies as Unionist or Nationalist closely resembles the patterns of who reports having a Protestant or Catholic background. Unionists prefer a closer political union with Great Britain and are predominantly Protestant, Nationalists are overwhelmingly Catholic and are in favor of joining the Republic of Ireland.
Catholic and Nationalist identities appear to have a greater salience for the post-agreement generations than for older generations who lived through the Troubles. For Protestant and Unionist respondents, the opposite is the case, as religious background and community affiliation have a higher salience among older groups, particularly among men. Among the adults we surveyed, for men the modal age of those identifying as Unionists is 58 years, for women it is 46.
When asked about the greatest problem facing Northern Ireland today, sectarianism still features strongly among both communities. Today, the fault lines of the conflict seem to resonate more with those from a Catholic background than with those from a Protestant background. While Protestants were predominantly concerned with poverty and crime, among Catholics sectarianism emerged most often as the greatest concern. Just over 50 percent of Catholic respondents mentioned an aspect relating to the Troubles (sectarianism or paramilitaries) as the greatest problem today, compared to only 39 percent of Protestant respondents. Most Protestant respondents selected Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol as the greatest problem, reflecting concerns of the Protestant community discussed in a Political Violence At A Glance post from 2021.
To what extent does economic status drive concerns? Those who see themselves as belonging to a lower-income group were more likely to identify poverty and unemployment as the greatest problem. Concerns about sectarianism and (former) paramilitary groups appeared most prevalent among those who placed themselves in the high-income group.
The continued presence of Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries is a noticeable feature in post-conflict Northern Ireland. While they are predominantly associated with violence and crime, some view them as a source of security and stability. While our findings show that concerns about paramilitaries were more prevalent among high-income earners, the perception of paramilitaries has a significant gender component. Nearly 50 percent of male Catholic respondents attributed a controlling influence to paramilitaries in their area. And while most of them saw these groups as a source of fear and intimidation, 32 percent agreed that the paramilitaries kept their local area safe. But only 5 percent of female Catholic respondents felt similarly. This difference is not as stark between female and male Protestant respondents. Both groups were substantially less likely than male Catholics to consider paramilitary groups as a source of safety.
Different perceptions of armed groups by gender are not unique to Northern Ireland. A 2014 study on Colombia found significant differences between female and male perceptions of post-conflict politics and participation. Although there were no substantial gender differences in the overall support for the peace process in Colombia, female respondents reported higher levels of distrust and skepticism toward demobilization, forgiveness, and reconciliation and higher disapproval of the political participation of former FARC members. The effect was even greater for mothers and women victimized during the conflict.
Violent attacks have dampened the anniversary celebration of the peace agreement and 25 years of relative stability. The recent injury of a police detective by an IRA splinter group, reports of paramilitary-style attacks and the use of petrol bombs against the police, coupled with turf battles between Ulster factions are continuous reminders of the presence and power that paramilitary organizations still hold across Northern Ireland. Even today, communities are kept under siege through violence and ransom. The formal termination of violent conflicts through peace agreements, as in the case of the Good Friday Agreement and other prominent examples such as the 2016 Colombian Peace Accord, does not automatically imply the disbandment of armed organizations. The impact of the presence of (former) armed groups in people’s daily lives continues to be high in most post-conflict contexts.
Findings from surveys in other post-conflict environments mirror this long shadow of war. A study of Croat and Serbian youths showed the continued impact of the Yugoslav Wars on ethnic group identities and how continued communal segregation impacts inter-group ethnic attitudes towards out-groups. A recent study finds that a decade after the civil war in Sri Lanka people from previously warring sides have very different views of peace and security. Respondents who belong to the defeated minority ethnic group, the Tamils, provided a more negative assessment of security and ethnic relations than those from the victorious majority, the Sinhalese. They also reported seeing irregular armed groups in a more protective role rather than a threatening one, when they encountered them, as we show here. And in many post-war countries, it’s the police who threaten peace, as discussed in this post. A study on Liberia found that experiences during the war continued to impact perceptions of the police afterwards. Victims of rebel violence were later more trusting of the police, while victims of state-perpetrated violence were not.
Much research is rightly concerned about how to avoid the conflict trap. Yet even countries that avoid falling back into full-scale civil war oftentimes do not offer adequate security and peace for all groups of their civilian population. Continued vigilance of unequal experiences and perceptions of security are necessary to work towards meaningful and lasting peace.
Sabine C. Carey is Professor of Political Science at University of Mannheim. Marcela Ibáñez is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Political Economy and Development at the University of Zurich. Eline Drury Løvlien is Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Teacher Education.
This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) via the Collaborative Research Center 884 “Political Economy of Reforms” at the University of Mannheim.
Real estate developments emulating U.S.-style master-planned communities are popular in Buenos Aires. Mara Dicenta unpacks the violence such developments enact on the environment and the community, as well as the resurgence against them.
The post The Violence of Gated Communities in Buenos Aires’s Wetlands appeared first on Edge Effects.
Enlarge / An AI-generated image from an #aicinema still series called "Vinyl Vengeance" by Julie Wieland, created using Midjourney. (credit: Julie Wieland / Midjourney)
Since last year, a group of artists have been using an AI image generator called Midjourney to create still photos of films that don't exist. They call the trend "AI cinema." We spoke to one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland, and asked her about her technique, which she calls "synthography," for synthetic photography.
Last year, image synthesis models like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney began allowing anyone with a text description (called a "prompt") to generate a still image in many different styles. The technique has been controversial among some artists, but other artists have embraced the new tools and run with them.
While anyone with a prompt can make an AI-generated image, it soon became clear that some people possessed a special talent for finessing these new AI tools to produce better content. As with painting or photography, the human creative spark is still necessary to produce notable results consistently.
A pilot flying a small plane in South Africa with four passengers aboard felt a "cold sensation … underneath my shirt at my hip area," and thought it was a leaky water bottle. Until he glanced to his left and saw a venomous cobra head making its way underneath his seat. — Read the rest
Today in the recurring series “America is Broken” — meaning, the news — three reporters at Pro Publica reveal that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted lavish gifts from Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor. Thomas has flown on Crow’s private jet many times, gone on vacations to Indonesia and New Zealand on Crow’s yacht, and spent time at Crow’s compound in the Adirondacks. In doing so, Thomas has violated norms pertaining to judges’ conduct and possibly broken federal law:
Soon after Crow met Thomas three decades ago, he began lavishing the justice with gifts, including a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass, which Thomas disclosed. Recently, Crow gave Thomas a portrait of the justice and his wife, according to Tarabay, who painted it. Crow’s foundation also gave $105,000 to Yale Law School, Thomas’ alma mater, for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund,” tax filings show.
Crow said that he and his wife have funded a number of projects that celebrate Thomas. “We believe it is important to make sure as many people as possible learn about him, remember him and understand the ideals for which he stands,” he said.
To trace Thomas’ trips around the world on Crow’s superyacht, ProPublica spoke to more than 15 former yacht workers and tour guides and obtained records documenting the ship’s travels.
On the Indonesia trip in the summer of 2019, Thomas flew to the country on Crow’s jet, according to another passenger on the plane. Clarence and Ginni Thomas were traveling with Crow and his wife, Kathy. Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, decked out with motorboats and a giant inflatable rubber duck, met the travelers at a fishing town on the island of Flores.
I did something I haven’t done in a while, I actually posted images to Flickr I took within a few hours and write titles and descriptions, and even tagged them. I know, crazy, right?
In many ways this seemingly moribund practice was resurrected by this discussion with Jon Udell on Mastodon. Jon was generously responding to my post about comparing Web 2.0 and Web3 for a presentation at OER23 this week, and his contributions were insightful (no surprise there) and started me thinking about the way many folks used to blog before the centralized social media sites. It was often for more often, a mix of long and short form, and not nearly as much psychological overhead at the idea of “writing a post.” You were just posting, it could be an image, a quick thought, or an essay, but long and short forms of writing lived together more comfortably, a practice Udell points to mico.blog as helping to preserve. More fodder for the presentation, thanks Jon!
Now, pair this with my recent post remembering the magic of the blogging conference NorthernVoice, and you might think I am heading for a web nostalgia tailspin. Fair enough, it might be the case, but one thing that was so cool about my looking back on NorthernVoice was the tags in Flickr that allowed me to see and remember the people, spaces, and general sense of that important moment. Many people caught it, and looking back visually was magic. I was like, damn, that’s a cool way to remember.
Scott Beale’s “Northern Voice 2007”
In fact, the founder of Laughing Squid, Scott Beale, wrote a post that included the mage above (forgive the Laughing Squid ads if you click through), providing a textbook example of just this kind of short-form blogging back in the day. He threw up some links to Flickr, quickly let folks know he was in Vancouver at a groovy blog conference hobnobbing with Anil Dash in less than a full paragraph. Not bad for a few minutes work
So, in that spirit, just wanted to let everyone know I arrived in Inverness, Scotland for the OER23 conference that will kick off with workshops and pre-conference events tomorrow, and then get going Wednesday and Thursday for two full days of re-connecting with some amazing people. I’m not sure what it is, but I am in the conference spirit right now and I am blogging like it is 2007! I will be uploading my pictures from the conference to Flickr with the tag OER23 and will also be posting here on the regular. I might event try and live blog a session or two, can you imagine that! What did Faulkner say? The past isn’t dead, it’s not even the past! Or something like that, that crazy southener!
Inverness was pretty glorious this afternoon.
FreshRSS 