Tag
Capitalism
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My Job Is to Fulfill Your Infantile Desire
“The outrageous expectations placed on Chinese e-commerce couriers may surprise western readers. … Such interactions document consumers’ obliviousness to labor along the supply chain.”
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Diaspora, Indebted: On “Industry”
“Gambling with big bets against challenging odds, regarded warily by moneylenders, questioned about your ability to balance your books, needing to take on more debt to pay back older debt. Whom exactly are we talking about here: Rishi or Britain?”
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Fascism’s Building Blocks: 100 Years of Murdering Migrant Workers
“The KKK’s terror campaign took a bloody toll. Between 1917 and 1920, 170 IWW union organizers were lynched or murdered in extra-judicial killings.”
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Fascism’s Building Blocks: A US Infrastructure Decades in the Making
“Immigration constitutes a leading edge of fascism today, because it has become such a sharply honed weapon for dividing ‘us’ and ‘them.’”
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B-Sides: Albert O. Hirschman’s “The Passions and the Interests”
“The Passions and the Interests” charms the reader as it persuades. Much of that charm is about its content as well as its style.
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“Suddenly, the New Story Was There”
“I had seen a lot of bitumen in the devastated landscapes of the bitumen mines. But seeing it here, in such a mundane and tranquil setting, surprised me. That was when I first understood that this material is natural.”
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Betwixt or Bewitched? Rethinking the “Middlebrow” with Dino Buzzati
Reframed as a “bewitched middlebrow,” Buzzati’s fiction re-enters literary history not as a comforting escape, but as a sharp tool for existential inquiry.
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“I Will Write to Avenge My Race”: Baglin, Louis, and Ernaux on Class Transition
“When people write about the working-class world, which they rarely do, it is most often because they have left it behind,” admits Didier Eribon, in his 2009 French memoir of class transition, Returning to Reims. “They thereby contribute to perpetuating the social illegitimacy of the people they are speaking of in the very moment of…
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Are Species Timeless?: Talking with Bathsheba Demuth About the Arctic
“There was an interdependence that was very clear in the animal relationships in the Arctic.”
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It’s Not Optimal
Four books about a new age of AI tell stories of sluggish processes, ambiguous outcomes, emotionally charged issues, and generous margins for error.
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America’s Pernicious Rural Myth: An Interview with Steven Conn
“Narratives about rural crisis seem to trap American discourse in a cycle of crisis and myth.”
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Money for Nothing: Finance and the End of Culture
Art continues to get made—that’s what human beings do—but capital devours it.
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Bad Beef
Rap beef is form of capitalist accumulation that enriches artists—and, most of all, the corporate suits that run their record labels.
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To Counteract Apocalyptic Technoscience, We Need New Myths
If there is contentment on the artist’s face, it is because she knows that she has left Babylon behind and is on her way to Zion.
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Asset Managers (Against) Society
A new book shows that asset manager ownership exacerbates the risks that they socialize—harming, rather than benefitting, users and governments.
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Public Thinker: Infrastructure Tells Us That We Need One Another
“Seeing infrastructural systems for what they are requires us to understand them as the product of massive collective investment and to reflect on the value of that.”
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Philanthropy’s Power Brokers
An in-depth reckoning with the Gates Foundation as a discrete actor is long overdue.
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Who Benefits from a “War on Corruption”?
Can anticorruption as a social movement or rhetorical strategy be a meaningful part of counterhegemonic resistance to such regimes?
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Is the World Enough?
Is our relation to the earth mainly a story of scarcity, of insatiable wants curbed by a finite planet?
