Who, elsewhere, will confront the rising tide of right-wing authoritarian politics?
April 20, 2023
By exceptionalizing his origins, he exceptionalizes himself.
J. D. Vance Changes the Subject
April 14, 2023

Florida in Philadelphia
The Temple University strike’s template for organizing the public university
The strike at Temple, therefore, was not just about material benefits for graduate workers: it was also about the long-term structural nature of what the contemporary university will be. It was about exposing the precarity of everyone—not just graduate workers but also adjuncts and even TT faculty—under academia’s current system.
December 23, 2022

A Strike Diary
On the New School picket line
Then the parents threatened a class-action lawsuit. The students occupied a university building. The full-time faculty began rumbles about a vote of no confidence against the president. They had nowhere left to go.
Shittiness is a big tent — and the tent is falling apart.
Why Is Everything So Ugly?
November 16, 2022

Mike Davis’s Specificities
Repetitious and reductive appeals to the universal never satisfied him
The US working class was forged, for Davis, through its compounded historical defeat, which gave it a distinctive contradictory, battered, and lumpy form that could not be evened out through appeals to abstraction. Most importantly, the cycle of defeat and accommodation had separated the official labor movement from the Black working class, which he saw as the only possible “cutting edge” for socialist politics.
August 11, 2022
The struggle of the working class has always been about how much of our time is stolen over a day and over a lifetime.
Abortion After the Baby Boom
July 13, 2022

The Burglaries Were Never the Story
Punctuated by Watergate, the Nixon Administration has been evacuated of its historical import
The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another. Whereas we understand how a growing country in the late 19th century could be brought together by open collusion of business interests, we give little attention today to how changing commercial opportunities during the Vietnam War might have torn apart the political accommodations that followed World War II. Watergate’s place in this history today is but a hairline fracture to the New Deal Order; a symbol rather than a decisive moment.
June 20, 2022

Stephen Curry and the Spirit of History
Most gratifying is how he did it
Rather than height or leaping ability, Curry creates spatial advantages by simply shooting from farther away than ever before. To prevent taller defenders from closing the distance, he speeds up his shot and increases the arc without losing efficiency, simulating the play of someone much bigger and bouncier than himself. He has collected an arsenal of different shooting forms: going left or right, backward or forward, shooting over or underneath defenders, off one leg or two, spotting up or off the dribble. It only works because of the dexterity and control of his fingertips, providing airtight ball handling abilities and freakish accuracy.
April 29, 2022
Musk is simply the first such rodent to take over the laboratory.
Musk Takes Twitter
April 27, 2022

What’s Disgusting? Union-Busting!
A rally at Amazon’s LDJ5 facility
We pedaled in single file, hugging the curb to avoid the trucks. And there was the rally! The spring clothes were bright, the air loud with hip-hop. Some women were selling fruit. Drivers were honking support. The ALU’s logo, three fists thrusting up from an open box, snatched the alienated mojo from the huge boxlike buildings stuffed with billions of smaller boxes and transformed it into solidarity and joy.

Lab-Leak Theory and the “Asiatic” Form
What is missing is a motive
I could not direct you to the key evidence that exonerates the Wuhan Institute, and it might not exist. But this is also the crucial point. There are too many lacunae in the lab-leak explanation for the theory to stand on its own: proponents must fill the gaps with their own projections and beliefs.