Before drifting off to sleep, I would read articles about the trial. One strategy of the prosecution was to let the plaintiffs themselves—their personalities, their histories—make a fresh case for the ability of homosexuals to form successful unions. The two halves of the male couple, Zarrillo and Katami, were affable and settled. Zarrillo had grown up in suburban New Jersey and attended the local high school. More…
From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole. What Ayn Rand once called the “freest, noblest country in the history of the world” is now the most incarcerated,and the second-most incarcerated country in history, just barely edged out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. More…
The first sign of trouble was a tweet: [at]mcduh: [at]questlove sayin he saw hundreds of riot cops on South St, Manhattan bout 1hr ago. #occupywallst [at]DiceyTroop are yall aware of anything? I immediately crossed Broadway on the south side of Liberty, side-stepping dormant traces of ongoing street maintenance and responding: [at]mcduh [at]questlove all quiet at the Park. What did you see questo? Maybe Batman stuff? More…
Even before Liberty Plaza was raided, many of us were asking what was next for Occupy Wall Street. The movement, we said, was about more than holding a space, even one in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district. Occupation, I often heard, was a means, not an end; a tactic, not a target. The goal, from the beginning, was to do more than build an outdoor urban commune. More…
For the first five weeks, the Wilmington, North Carolina General Assembly met on benches under a pavilion in Greenfield Lake Park, a public property just south of downtown where signs warn passersby not to feed or tease the alligators. I’d heard that at least 100 people had attended the first GA on October 8. But when I showed up on a Saturday afternoon in late October, there were only six or seven people present. More…
The New School needed to improve its financial situation and its status, and it was going to do it, like any New York institution, through real estate. They were going to tear down one of their old buildings and replace it with a state-of-the-art gleaming sixteen-story tower, home to studios for designers and artists and laboratories (for whom, no one could tell you). More…
I write this on the day that the UC Regents will meet via teleconference to decide whether to raise UC tuition by 81 percent. They originally planned to hold the meeting last week in San Francisco but rescheduled due to fears of too many protestors. Their fears were well justified. The general assembly at Davis called for a strike on the UC campuses today. More…
Following the eviction of Zuccotti Park in the early morning of November 15, I came with several friends from Occupy Boston to support the mass day of action on November 17. The earliest, riskiest mass action planned that day was to prevent the New York Stock Exchange from opening on time by blocking the surrounding streets. Protesters were meeting at 7 AM to march from several locations to the Exchange. More…
I was on one of the wildcat marches north from the park towards Astor Place, and I managed to make it back before they charged the last stand at Broadway and Pine. I think we won something both places. I didn’t hear a single chant about banks, the wars, or austerity, and that was fine. Instead they were about the police about how we weren’t going anywhere, about our right to be together on a sidewalk. More…
Among the endless, nearly bureaucratic proliferation of working groups at Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere—people of color, sanitation, media, alternative banking, sustainability, anti-racism allies, disability—one stands out for its simultaneous universality and total narrowness. The labor working group, in any occupation, has a very clear and dully unobjectionable task. More…
This movement has clearly entered its second phase. We may have lost Zuccotti Park, and city government clearly intends to keep us out of other public spaces that we have used to assemble. But the movement is far from dead. We are just beginning. Working groups from OWS have meetings and events planned for the months ahead. They will continue to meet and continue to grow. More…
The right, very simply, wants us out of America’s public life: the First Amendment may protect our right to rant, but only if we can do it without money and without space. These essays, then, come from New York: the real and imagined city where feminist sexual liberationists, rootless cosmopolitan Jews, not nice girls/boys/others, loudmouth exiles of all colors are an integral and conspicuous part of the landscape. More…
“What are they so afraid of?” I had asked my friend when we first arrived at Wall Street just after 1 AM, and as I watched this excessive use of force the question kept ringing in my ears. But the answer is obvious: they are afraid of us. “This peaceful uprising against our sickening plutocracy has them quaking with fear,” a friend remarked, proud and surprised. More…
A massive police action undertaken in the middle of the night against an unarmed, defenseless, and mostly sleeping group, with the aim of their forcible removal and the incidental destruction of most of their personal property was ordered, we learned, ostensibly in the name of “guaranteeing public health and safety.” Why in the middle of the night? More…
I believe that when your Officer Cho was leaning on my chest last night with a plastic police shield, to clear room for pedestrians who didn’t exist, pushing hard with a line of his coworkers on a crowd of us, he said to me, from behind his plastic visor, where he could watch us all as if on television, or in his car, so he didn’t have to think, this phrase: “It’s a game.” More…
Right before midnight I tuned into the Zuccotti Park livestream. I had been down there earlier that afternoon but I still felt compelled to check in. Though the encampment, with the help of a couple thousand early-rising allies, had successfully resisted the city’s eviction attempt days before, I had a lingering sense that the occupation was something precious that could dissipate or be destroyed as quickly as it had emerged. More…
The 2001 sit-in by the Harvard living wage campaign had something in common with Occupy Wall Street: neither shut its target down. At Harvard, we occupied the main administrative building, Massachusetts Hall, for three weeks demanding a living wage with benefits for all campus workers. What good is an occupation if it doesn’t prevent the occupied from functioning? We worried about that, but we shouldn’t have. More…
The question everybody asks, of course, is what’s going to happen next? Will the movement continue to grow? Or will it peak and fizzle out? That’s a decision all of us get to make together. The potential of Occupy Wall Street is clear, but it is everyone’s responsibility to turn promise into real power. It is not up to “them”—some imaginary cadre of diehard or professional activists—to build a successful movement for “us.” More…
In this special edition of the n+1 podcast, Liz Hynes sits down with Nathan Schneider of Waging Non-Violence, n+1 editor Charles Peterson, and Sarah Leonard of Dissent and The New Inquiry to discuss Occupy Wall Street. The group explores everything from new tactics of resistance to mainstream media’s obsession with sanitation at Zuccotti Park. More…
“Who are they and what are their demands?” everyone immediately demanded to know. The puzzlement showed how the movement that began on September 17 as Occupy Wall Street differs from the great social movements of the past fifty years. It’s another thing entirely to redefine the American populace at large as an excluded group, cast out from the democracy and prosperity that supposedly form the national birthright. More…
At 4 PM that day, people who had not been arrested, as well as supporters of Occupy Oakland, rallied at the Oakland public library to show support of those arrested and outrage over the destruction of the camps. What began as a rally and march of about 500 people turned into a march of thousands. We marched through Oakland reclaiming our streets and demanding our parks be returned to us. More…
New York is this country’s “union town,” with an incredible 25 percent of the city’s workforce organized—the highest percentage in the US. If unions work to animate even a fraction of their broad, diverse membership into concrete campaigns and solidarity work, we could see the issues raised by OWS translate into real changes at the level of our workplaces, our communities, and our policies. More…
The creation of an archive or memorial, even in real time, does not by itself constitute resistance, and it might be the case that the 99 percenters represented by the Tumblr will be viewed by future historians as the necessary fallen of the age of post-industrialization, the great adjustment, or whatever name they give our present moment of economic and social realignment. More…
The tedious transformation of substantive political protest into protest against police abuse of protesters at times can be ideologically appropriate and tactically useful. But unlike student, neighborhood, and even civil rights protests, whose participants generally present themselves as a conscientious minority, the Occupiers’ central claim is that they are the “99 percent,” the moral majority of the nation. More…
The first planning meeting of Occupy Philadelphia was to be held at the Wooden Shoe Bookstore, an anarchist collective; the day of the meeting, Thursday September 29, 200 people showed up, so it was moved to the Arch Street United Methodist Church near City Hall. The church holds a capacity of 900 people. Last night, at the first General Assembly, there were at least a thousand. More…
The group here was much larger than the one gathered around Moore, but it didn’t feel like a crowd—people were calm, attentive, at ease. A lot of them were sitting down. In order to be heard, speakers relied on “human microphones”: they’d say a few words, then pause while the group repeated their statement. After an explanation of the assembly process for the sake of any newcomers came reports from working groups. More…
The group had congregated in Zuccotti Park at Liberty Plaza, a paved rectangle between Broadway and Trinity Place, and looked to be at least a few hundred strong. Instead of a single, unified congregation, there were smaller circles of ten to fifty people, some with megaphones. Some circles had moderators and agendas, others appeared to be more spontaneous More…
It was kind of nice to be at a protest and, instead of marching and shouting, to be talking about ideas. It felt like the script had changed, and that was a revelation. As 7 PM approached, my friends and I left thinking the cops would clear everyone out in no time. When they made it through the night I began to give them more credit, so I dropped off a bunch of blankets and provisions later that evening. More…
If you are a US citizen born when I was, in the winter of 1984, soldiers have been deployed on your behalf in every year of your life. Not just in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan—but in every region, on every continent, from Germany to Colombia to South Korea. Are we always at war? Depends on your definition, sure, and a tour in Italy is not the same as a tour in the Korengal Valley. But we are not a nation of pacifists. More…
At the end of the night of Wisconsin’s first round of recall elections, now some two weeks ago, liberal heads were hanging low. Democrats needed to take back three seats in order to regain control of the State Senate. That they would win two of those seats, those held by Dan Kapanke and Randy Hopper, was all but given. Possibilities for winning back the critical third seat, though, were limited to District 8. More…
A family in the Powhatan collected Joseph Cornell boxes, which my mother once took Lucy and me to see. Lining a dark dining room, the boxes held frightening arrangements of clock faces, newspaper cuttings, and birds, which I was afraid might start moving. Looking at the boxes was like listening to adults talk to each other, overhearing some words I couldn’t understand, but whose feeling I could begin to guess at. More…
The April 2008 issue of Forbes included Seattle in its list of “recession-proof” cities, citing manufacturing growth and declining unemployment. Amazon and Microsoft were still hiring. But that May something strange happened—with three new condo buildings in progress in South Lake Union, Vulcan rolled out an incentive program, offering to pay part of the closing cost for current renters who’d like to buy. More…
I was born in 1986 in Mt. Auburn, an old annexed suburb just up the hill from Over-the-Rhine, and for the eleven years I lived there I was the only white kid on the street. It was the kind of street white Cincinnatians patronizingly call “black middle class“—as though if you’re black in Cincinnati, and you live in a neighborhood where only 25 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, you’re doing pretty well. More…
In my parents’ eyes, founding a feminist club at my school had made feminism the x factor that would get me into a good college, which meant that when I told them I was going to sleep at P.’s house because it was the twentieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade and Operation Rescue was hitting DC’s abortion clinics at 6 in the morning and we had to be there first to keep the clinics open, they had to let me go, because feminism was my thing. More…
Almost all the added debt since 2000 can be traced to policies enacted under the cover of post-September 11th nationalism; these policies cemented the transition from neoliberalism to full-blown neoconservatism. While preaching the beauty of small government, neoliberals and conservatives redistributed wealth upwards by expanding the government’s reach. More…
Here’s a statistic: upwards of 60,000 Vietnam veterans are believed to have killed themselves since the end of the war. That’s more than the number of Americans who died in the war—think of the size of Maya Lin’s memorial, then double it, and you’ll have an idea of what it means. But then, that number is unconfirmed, and possibly quite low. The number of veteran suicides, like all things related to the Vietnam war, is a point of contention. More…
For the last few years I’ve been seeing woodsmen on my city’s streets. They wear long beards and long hair, or long beards and no hair. They favor beat-up leather boots and wool beanies and jobs involving wood. At Best Made Co., they purchase hand-painted axes and canvas portage packs. At APC, they try on pieces by Carhartt that have been recut for slimmer legs and thicker wallets. More…
The Cone Mills White Oak denim factory sits out past the college football stadium and baseball diamonds on the nether edge of downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. Named for a large tree on the property, it is bordered by narrow, numbered streets cluttered with eyeless and empty ranch-style houses that seem to clamor up to the factory gates, dusty “for rent” signs swaying in their freshly seeded front yards. More…
M is a journalist in Kentucky who went through a nasty divorce a few years back. She was drinking white wine in those days and coping with an abusive ex-husband but she pulled herself together, went through rehab, and raised two kids who adore her. The kids are out of the house now, and M is six years sober. She lives alone in a small town along the I-75 corridor just south of Cincinnati. More…
I spent most of my teenage years in Wauwatosa, one of Milwaukee’s oldest suburbs. In the 1960s, at the height of the city’s civil rights struggle, it was one of the hotbeds of racist resistance: when Father Groppi led a protest march into the town, he was met by Klansmen and other onlookers who waved signs reading “Keep Tosa White.” By the early 2000s, such explicit racism was rarely seen. More…
The funeral came off without a hitch, in spite of the snow. It was as dignified as we could have hoped for and no one from the altar mentioned what had happened. I parked my rental car on Argyle Avenue, feeling a bit more alert than usual. In Atlanta, just after Thanksgiving, two gunmen robbed me of my station wagon and wallet; two days before Christmas I didn’t want to invite fate’s wrath a second time. I was back home in Baltimore. More…
Americans have always been suspicious of our cities. Before the Civil War, writers competed to denounce them in the strongest possible terms, culminating in the twin Transcendentalist broadsides of Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden. The latter prompted Henry James, himself no fan of the city, to describe its author as an “essentially sylvan personage.” More…
My parents returned to Milwaukee early last Tuesday after spending six days at my aunt and uncle’s condo in Hollywood, Florida. My parents aren’t wealthy enough to buy their own Florida condo—and they probably wouldn’t buy a condo in Hollywood, Florida if they had that kind of money, anyway—but they do, after a combined sixty years working in public education, have enough money and security to head down there on a whim. More…
On Tuesday, thousands of pro-union protesters in Ohio joined former Governor Ted Strickland and traveled to Columbus, the state capital, where the legislature plans new hearings on a bill that would end collective bargaining for state workers and dramatically reduce bargaining power for local workers, including public school teachers, police officers, and firefighters. More…
I arrived at the plant around 11:30 on Sunday, hoping to see the Arkansans. When I walked into the press shop, I didn’t see a soul. The fire in the basket above 2-line was nearly out— a clue in itself as to how many people might be about. The Budd plant must have been one of the few places on earth where fire’s presence or absence was still a predictor of human habitation. More…
“American government is run by and for capital and capitalists. Most Americans hate government. Most Americans love capitalism and capitalists.” A special election syllogism from n+1 and some favorites from our politics archives on Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, swing voters, and election memories. More…
This is my love letter to state of things in southern Afghanistan, composed in the name of preempting the fraudulent onset of post-traumatic stress disorder. And also written because I want to write it. That, I’m coming around to believe, is a crucial distinction between falling prey to the disorder and appropriating its causes constructively. I think it comes down to control and poise. But who knows. More…
One begins to think of race in Obama’s America like sex in some caricature of Freud’s Vienna: simultaneously the main theme of all conversation, and the one that can’t be mentioned. Instead of being “overcome,” historic American racism against nonwhite people has gone into deep cover and, with the irrefutable illogic of the unconscious, emerged as a newfangled American antiracism for the protection of white people. More…
People in Bayou La Batre will talk to you about the oil spill, but they’d rather show you the high water mark in their oyster shop, their pool hall, or their home. The dramatic visibility of Hurricane Katrina makes it easier to talk about, easier to internalize than the BP oil spill. Next to newly built houses you find FEMA trailers, now used for storage. More…
For months my friend John had been promising to treat me to an epic Detroit bar crawl. When we finally got together one Saturday night in July, John announced that he was taking me to Club Thunderbolt. It was a strip club a guy named Jay ran out of his dead parents’ house, in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. More…
The government report is admirably lucid and bears a formidable textual apparatus, including 115 pages of endnotes. But it lacks an index. To remedy this, and following the cue of n+1 friend Caleb Crain, we have assembled a team of indexers. More…
Earlier this fall, as part of its “New New York Intellectuals” series at Eugene Lang College, n+1 hosted a discussion with young conservative writers Ross Douthat and Reihan Salaam. Listen now from your safe, undisclosed location as n+1 tries to find out who’s right, who’s Right, and why! More…
I didn’t join the Peace Corps to “save the world,” and I had few pretensions of engaging in major community-changing development. I did expect to work toward the long-term development of school #2’s educational program—this seemed to be ingrained in Peace Corps Turkmenistan’s goals for its TOEFL program. More…
Throughout his marathon campaign Barack Obama managed to manifest a number of moments of radical privacy that, it seemed, had nothing at all to do with escaping the glare of the spotlight, nothing at all to do with not being seen or heard or otherwise captured—something that would likely have been detrimental to his campaign, and surely impossible in any event. More…
The night of the Iowa caucus, I wanted to quit my job and pack a bag for Chicago or New Hampshire or wherever the action was. I didn’t go to either of those places, and I put off my political wanderlust for an embarrassingly long 9 months, but I did end up where the action was. More…
Early on Saturday morning, the weekend before Election Day, I drove down to Philadelphia with my old college buddy James to put in some get-out-the-vote work for the Obama campaign. James, a staff member for a union of service workers, was obligated to work long hours in a variety of grassroots campaign work. I had never done this before. More…
I remember the New Yorker “Talk of the Town” when the first rumors of the Lewinsky scandal came out. One of Clinton’s aides was interviewed, not knowing whether the rumors were true or not, convinced (as was the case) that the Republicans, looking for one thing (Whitewater), had found something else (Lewinsky), but adding: “If you want to know who I blame, I blame Clinton. I blame him.” More…
The GOP convention trumped the Democratic—because some intelligence there is, in their control room, who can conceive of mastery on the grandest scale; a moral monster, to be sure; a jinni of evil. Someone behind the scenes held the key and boldly turned it: someone foresaw that the means of hatching a McCain triumphant was to make of him a risen God. More…
How can Barack Obama, a man who only recently paid off his student loans and who lives a relatively modest life in Chicago’s Hyde Park, a few blocks from one of America’s poorest neighborhoods, be more “elitist” than John McCain, the son of an admiral (not to mention the husband of a beer heiress)? Yet the E-word still hangs heavy over his otherwise charmed campaign. More…
In the once anonymous town of Petersberg, Kentucky, seven miles west of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, and “within a day’s drive of almost 2/3 of the U.S. population,” the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum makes a 27-million-dollar, 65,000-square-foot attempt to prove the Bible’s creation story is “the true history book of the universe.” More…
The left might have the opportunity, in the crisis of global warming, to tip the ongoing rulemaking of the economic world-system in favor of regulation rather than laissez-faire; to restrain the growth of current concentrations of capital within extracting and polluting sectors; and to reintroduce an essentially aesthetic criterion into the ongoing dollar valuation of the entire world. More…
I’ve been thinking about this letter since Thanksgiving, but I haven’t found the time to write down my thoughts until now. They’re thoughts about your support for Hillary Clinton—the prospect of whose presidency seems to excite similar emotions in you as the prospect of a Barack Obama presidency excites in me. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could be enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton. More…
Bobby Seale, 70 years old, founder and former Chairman of the Black Panther Party, is heavy-lidded, heavy-set, and bald. This is ironic: if the Black Panthers were united on anything, it was their hatred of baldness. Full, picked-out Panther afros (particularly those of women) are distinct symbols of pride, self-worth, revolutionary progress. More…
In America today, what’s “literary” often seems like a subset of what’s “liberal.” Come on, I thought: there has to be somebody who can write a decent character-driven short story who also thinks George W. Bush is a good president. More…
Walking out of Grand Central Station, New Yorkers pass a Hyatt and a Kenneth Cole. The Hyatt is full of tourists. The Kenneth Cole storefront declares, “You’re on a video camera over twenty times a day. Are you dressed for it?” We’d better be. Those creepy-eyed, ceiling-mounted black domes are ubiquitous in drug stores, retail outlets, and everywhere else. More…
Accusing one’s political enemies of lying is certainly an old tactic, and often enough an effective one. But as an explanation for the Republicans’ recent success it falls short of complete. Sure, the Republicans are lying—but this line of argument forgets about voters and discounts their reasons for voting. More…
Of the major conflicts of the past decade and a half, Michael Walzer’s declarations are unsurprising. The first Gulf War: just. The intervention in Kosovo: just. The war against the Taliban: just, but maybe inadvertently so. The current war in Iraq: unjust. More…
Clothing really has become indecent, and there’s little harm in passing an unenforceable law acknowledging this. In the library where I’m writing this piece, I count ten women with visible midriffs and two with “ass cleavage.” Among the men, fewer in number, two wear close-fitting tank-tops. This is to go to the library? More…
I am not a Democratic strategist; it seems no one is. But since the defeat one of the commonest proposed remedies to our situation has been to show our opponents more respect. The trouble with Democratic voters and candidates, it is alleged, is our elitism: snug in our cosmopolitan ghettoes, speaking in full paragraphs, fondling old snapshots of France… More…
My mood swings on this are so violent. I was sure at the end of the third debate that Kerry would sweep the nation. But watching five minutes of the Sunday morning talk shows this weekend, while we were staying with my in-laws, convinced me that we were going to lose by just as much. Debates, I realized, are a 19th—no, actually, an 18th-century political format that has, wonderfully, survived. More…
What if all the libels, brazen lies, gerrymandering, and fake voter registration groups that tear up the cards of Democrats are a shift from the symbolic violence of games to real violence in a real war where anything goes and not even the past will be safe if the enemy wins? More…
As last Sunday showed, 2004 is not 1968, and the confrontation with the Man is less important than the relationship between demonstrators and the media who cover them. The new breed of demonstrators understand themselves as event planners for an audience of journalists who will then pass on the message to their readers and viewers. Primarily, they are performers. More…
So far, so anticlimactic. The supposed repeat of the 1968 Chicago convention and its disastrous consequences (violence, Nixon’s election) has not taken place. The protesters have behaved themselves and the police have settled for arresting bicyclists and bystanders, some of whom happened to be lawyers and journalists. Things may yet get worse in the coming days, but right now this looks like another Orange alert. More…
This is the way to dignify an American Empire. Right now we plant democracy like an orchid and depart—leaving behind oilmen to drain nutrients out of the soil. Better to offer a plot in our own garden, so to speak, protected and sheltered by many hardy perennials, who find the new shoot in no way inferior. More…
