What is this a description of but free association and fantasy gone wrong?
January 18, 2022

Seeing Through the Museum
On Dave McKenzie
December 13, 2021

Border Crises
Five decades of ordinary bipartisan anti-immigrant politics
In May 2018, as Trump’s family separation policy became a major scandal, former Obama speechwriter and “Pod Save America” host Jon Favreau tweeted a photo of two migrant girls sleeping on the floor of a cage. “Look at these pictures. This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible.” As a number of his replies pointed out, the photos were actually from 2014, when his boss was still President. As with Biden’s response to the recent assault on Haitians, Favreau was fixated on the image.
December 6, 2021
He was a Black nationalist sympathizer who advocated for integration and a reformist who argued for revolution.
The Journalist and the Movement
Wasn’t the real lesson of this case that strip searches are so violent that they are unjustifiable?
The State vs. Ms. X
What will the long-term political consequences of the vaccine mandates be?
Vax 2 the Max

L’Autore Invisible
Ralph Ellison in Italian
Translators themselves want to seem inconspicuous, like imperial clerks toiling away in a dark garret, resolving geopolitical issues by working out the finer terms in the draft of a big treaty. The collective need for invisibility creates a language that’s even, parsed out, correct — a language that escorts books out of their country and dresses them up as responsible travelers.

Circle of Visibility
The familiar shadow of American self-realization
What is the remedy for dropping a bomb on fellow human beings, allowing their homes and the homes of their neighbors to burn to the ground, shooting at those trying to escape the fire, giving near life sentences to the survivors, and then, covertly, keeping the bones of those who died in the attack as trophies? What is the remedy for the creation and maintenance of the carceral state?

Pictures at a Restoration
On Pete Souza’s Obama
Once safely out of office, he acknowledged that “millions of Americans” had been “spooked by a black man in the White House.” An undeniable truth, but one that was miles away from the embrocations he had offered the country when he launched his national career by declaring that “there is not a black America and a white America.” That kind of thing sounds like denialism to some, a postracial utopia to others, and then, in certain places, like a threat.
Black struggle struck the match.
Magic Actions
June 5, 2021

To H.
Extreme disparity here acts as a unifying foundation
May 7, 2021
Black struggle struck the match.