September 4, 2025
Injury to Buildings and Vegetables
The ability to impose pollution on others is another aspect of class rule
Read MoreAlyssa Battistoni
All articles by this author
You have one body and twenty-four hours in a day. An organizer asks what you’ll do with them, concretely, now.
Spadework
May 26, 2017
Just the Beginning, Yale
On graduate labor and the Yale commencement protest
On Monday, Peter Salovey, president of Yale University, strode down the tree-lined streets of downtown New Haven, garbed in voluminous robes, a massive pendant, and a velvet cap with a gold, dangling tassel. Before him walked a scowling bulldog puppy that strained against its leash. Handsome Dan XVIII, the university’s mascot, was processing in his first commencement, and both figureheads were being very, very good boys.
Monstrous, Duplicated, Potent
On Donna Haraway
By the end of the book, we’ve learned all manner of detail about the Acacia tree genus, made up of fifteen hundred species, living in climates ranging from desert to tropics and found in ice cream, beer, and postage stamps. We learn about the Pimoa chthulu spider, Haraway’s neighbor in the North Central California redwoods and another inspiration for the Chthulucene. We learn about the history of Premarin estrogen tablets, made out of horse urine, and their effects on both midcentury reproductive politics and Cayenne Pepper’s bladder.
August 26, 2016
After Columbia
Deans often feign surprise at graduate student complaints, and claim not to notice the thousands petitioning them every semester.
We need an Obama or Clinton NLRB to step in at Harvard and Yale, in other words, because Obama’s and Clinton’s friends and allies, their cronies and chiefs of staff, are preventing workers at those universities from exercising their rights. The reason we need to put a Democrat in the White House is to keep Democrats at bay in the private sector. The reason we need an Obama or Clinton to run the state is to stop Obamism and Clintonism in civil society.
March 25, 2015
Marching Through the Institutions
On NYU and the future of graduate student unionism
Academic life moves slowly. The university system is always changing, but the current is sluggish enough that it’s easy to imagine the institution is fixed in some permanent form. Then, sometimes, things happen fast.
