July 16, 2026
Palpable in the team’s vulnerable performance was a feeling that this tournament was going to be especially beleaguered
Thirty-one years after the birth of its democracy, South Africa remains plagued by the ghosts of colonization and Apartheid and continues to reproduce the same violence it sought to overcome.
June 23, 2026
The idea of buying Greenland is less a historical deviation than a revival of a longstanding practice of buying sovereignty, one that goes hand in hand with the expropriation of land by force
Denying that history could have been otherwise or making conquest subject to some unwritten statute of limitations are both ways of cloaking not just the US’s imperial past but its continuation into the present, with or without Kalaallit Nunaat. Buying Greenland was more than a threat to NATO, it was a threat to make American empire visible again.
May 29, 2026
At the Museum of Errantry
Cárdenas engages the arid landscape, the dead tree, the dried-out wood, and sculpts into existence a beginning—a way into the future eked out of a barren present.
We have had too much America and not enough América in our shared hemispheric life.
March 26, 2026
The destruction is real. Israel and the US are deindustrializing Iran.
September 11, 2025
What is the weight of calling for mutual understanding while the subjugation of Palestinians is ongoing?
August 21, 2025
Three Palestinian student poets
My weapon is better
My weapon is organic
It is an organ, a pulse, a history
July 28, 2025
On José Donoso and his translators
Too long, too hard, too loose, too crass: these are the problems that abridgment seeks to fix. They are only problems to a writer’s enemies: politicians, skimmers, benefactors, and prudes. (For now we will spare critics, editors, translators, educators, and, naturally, other writers.) Who, then, abridged The Obscene Bird of Night—and what were they trying to fix?
You’re not in charge, the plant said to me, as clearly as if it were a person.
January 17, 2025
A conversation with Jordan Thomas on fire suppression and prescribed burning in the megafire era
The job parameters for wildland firefighters haven’t changed significantly since the 1980s. What has changed significantly since the ’80s is the climate. So essentially, they’re working with the job expectations, compensation, and health care packages of a planet in which they fight fires for maybe 10 percent of their time and spend the other 90 percent doing forest management projects. But now wildland firefighters spend at least 90 percent of their time fighting fires, if not 100 percent of their time. Their compensation hasn’t kept up with that, partly because it’s impossible to increase pay and benefits at the federal level when you need Republican congressional approval to do so.
On Mahdi Amel
This is how Amel is remembered today: charismatic, courageous, defiant. Walking in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood, you’ll likely encounter a stenciled image of Amel’s face, looking out with a beaming smile, with graffiti urging passersby to read his work. As a friend once remarked to me, the combination of Amel’s martyrdom and his difficult prose makes him a perfect object for cultish fervor. But the renewed interest in his work — in the streets, in movement spaces, in academia — is real and widespread.
September 27, 2024
On Mahdi Amel
The concrete dilemmas which Amel faced and the answers he tried to articulate continue to provide models for a unity of revolutionary thought and action. Like his other formulations, Amel’s “colonial mode of production” is an artifact of struggle, developed at a time of worsening defeat, from the 1967 Naksa to the expulsion of the Palestinian resistance and the left during the Lebanese Civil War. It is an ambitious but practical theoretical apparatus, meant to link the battles of far-flung societies and their toiling classes, in and after the crucible of national independence.
