October 13, 2026
HUM 2380: How Can I Survive, Reproduce, and Flourish?
American Politics
September 11, 2026
The Hi-Neighbor! Mayor
On David Morales
Read MoreSeptember 4, 2026
The investor swayed by a billboard that simply says “caffeine” knows they’re getting table scraps.
The Billboards of Silicon Valley
September 4, 2026
Social and Anti-Social Housing
New York as shitty Vienna?
We have public housing, but it has never been as well designed, built, or maintained. We have limited-equity co-ops built by limited-dividend companies, but we built far fewer of them, and we allowed some to go private. We have inclusionary zoning, but whereas their model requires two-thirds of the development to be social housing, ours only demands that one-third be targeted to tenants under a certain household income.
We are in a moment of fascist abundance.
The Disappearance Machine
Orange Era
First it was a fire, then it was a color, and before too long it became a regime unto itself
As familiar as they are, these orange maps can only depict a rehearsal, a prelude. In the pre-vaccine moment the Covid maps were terrifying, but examining them, you could imagine a future after orange. One feels very different looking at the climate maps. There is no de-escalating from orange.
Months into her tenure, she’s invited to light the Hanukkah menorah at the Obama White House.
The Right Reform Rabbi
July 27, 2026
In the Grip of Politics
The irony of the Report is that its attempt to oppose the politicization of academia is more stridently political than the fields it aims to critique
All of us, from academics to fishermen, have now internalized a practice of reading the social world as a field of political or latently political signs. TV watching habits, food choices, clothing, interpretive approaches to 19th-century British literature: Everything becomes an opportunity to take a political stand, and to position yourself in relation to others taking political stands—and in a profession where discourse is everything, such opportunities abound.
July 20, 2026
I left feeling a pooling, connective happiness. I went home and realized I hadn’t looked at my phone for six hours.
Getting Off with the Luddites
July 3, 2026
There will be no Freedom Train this year.
Semiquincentennial Blues
June 23, 2026
Wake Up and Smell the Reality
It's fitting that MoU is only one letter removed from IOU
Tacitly or openly, officials and observers on all sides of the deal—even those who otherwise seem to inhabit different universes—acknowledge that the US has lost the war. And should the war resume, as Israel hopes, the US will lose again. “You can’t kill your way out of . . . every national security problem”; but you can sure as hell die trying.
ICE in Autumn
On Operation Midway Blitz
Oscar Martinez’s remarks were emblematic of a more general response to Midway Blitz: an aggrieved, futile attempt to correct someone who has violently misinterpreted reality. Over and over, I heard Chicagoans point to the normality of life as a kind of defense against the menacing accusations and absurd theories that ICE, Border Patrol, and national politicians had promulgated about the city and then, through the government’s own violence, manifested into being.
