Section
Politics
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The Waiting Is the Point: Time, Suffering, and Medicaid
“To be poor and sick in America is to live in delay. The Medicaid system does not just reflect that reality—it enforces it.”
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Strangers in the Family Album: Reflections on Soviet Amateur Photography
The appearance of strangers within family photo albums was part of how a Soviet imagined and imaged community was constructed and sustained.
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Forever Wars, Forever Forgotten
As the war on terror expanded abroad, paradoxically, it faded further into the American background.
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In the Führerbunker with Carlyle and Yarvin
Curtis Yarvin—and, through him, arguably, Thomas Carlyle—has now emerged as a significant source of ideas for the present administration.
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“Flawed from the Outset”: Sonali Thakkar on the UN’s 1950 Attempt to Redefine Race
Liberal antiracism has been undermined precisely because it doesn’t answer the real questions that we care about.
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Lone Star Futures
Texas might have been a place to start a conversation about widening the scope of civil liberties, but it has unfortunately also been a place where those liberties find some of their ends.
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When Universities Are Agents of the State
The story of Israeli universities serves as a warning for what US academia could become.
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“Endless Bad Infinity”: Noah Kulwin and Brendan James on the Feedback Loop of American Empire
“We are not picking on things that were particularly happy memories for the American war machine.”
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“The Basic Liberal Narrative Is Gone”: Immigrant Rights and Abolition with Silky Shah
“A singular focus on conditions, rather than the violence of immigration detention itself, just lent itself to expansion.”
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Care Work is Necessary for Anti-Imperialist Struggle
As a means of disrupting the university’s predominant ways of being and relating, the encampment’s ethic of care was not extinguished by the raid.
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Rethinking Reconstruction: Kate Masur on “Freedom Was in Sight”
“Freedom Was in Sight” conveys that even as Reconstruction ended and the Jim Crow order took shape in the South, not everything was lost.
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Slavery Is Not a Metaphor: Rethinking Mass Incarceration with John Bardes
In the aftermath of the American Revolution, slaveholders in the South were thinking about what a prison should look like for a society that was economically and socially dependent on slavery.
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Civility and/or Social Change?
“Agreeing to disagree” requires tolerating the intolerable.
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Beyond the Doom Loop of High Theory
If paradox can be toxic, what’s the antidote?
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Symbolic Sovereignty: Alvita Akiboh on the Materiality of Empire
“The US flag is always flying; if you buy something, the money is US money; and the stamps are US stamps.”
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Abolish Sheriffs: Talking with Jessica Pishko
“My perspective is that we should abolish the office of the sheriff.”
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A Prison the Size of the State, A Police to Control the World
Two new books examine how colonial logic has long been embedded within US carceral systems.
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The Fight for Justice Starts with Blocking Judges Who Are “Tough on Crime”
The story of how Ed Carnes became a judge offers crucial lessons for those who hope to unwind the policies of mass incarceration.
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An Open Letter to Prison Officials on the Censorship of “Tip of the Spear”
Your censorship of my book must be understood within a broader context.
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See Me like a State
As stories about flashy new technologies eclipse more measured coverage, it becomes easy for foreign audiences, particularly those in America, to lose track of the actual harms inflicted by China’s surveillance state.
