"Maybe that’s one thing the pandemic has allowed—for us to be a bit more honest about our struggles."
Tag: COVID-19
The World Continues to Need Octavia E. Butler
Pandemics, racist violence, climate change, democratic collapse: it’s finally clear that it’s Butler’s world. We’re just living in it.
Succeeding through Failure: Andrew Lakoff on Preparing for Emergencies
“What is the range of available measures to address our catastrophic future?”
Public Thinker: Sophie Gonick on Housing Justice and Mass Movements
“As often the most vulnerable in our cities, immigrants face struggles that reflect the wider landscape of housing precarity.”
COVID: The Pandemic Without Honor?
“I don’t believe there was any conspiracy inside government to kill people off,” a health official explains. “From what I saw there was no plan.”
Portrait of the Global Migrant Crisis
COVID-19 highlights how the global order is built on, and excels in, closing the path of migrants unjustly.
Promises Unkept: Damon Galgut and Andrew van der Vlies
“A lot of people have been pushed a little closer to the margins.”
Pedagogy of the Depressed
“At a certain point, it seemed like all my students were depressed… This was depressing.”
Trapped Inside with Bo Burnham
Autofiction like Burnham’s—or Wallace’s, or Lerner’s—show white men using irony, self-deprecation, and vulnerability. Should we listen?
“There’s No There There”: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the Future of the Left
“We don't have a party. That doesn't mean we need one big organization. We may need a few big organizations. But we need organizations!”
You Are Never Alone at the Museum
What do we see when looking at art from the perspective of the infrastructures that sustain it?
COVID Won’t Change Higher Ed, but Anti-racism Might
Racial-justice movements in higher education offer a template for how to dislodge education’s focus on entrenching prestige.
Prison Tech Comes Home
Landlords’, bosses’ and schools’ intrusion of surveillance technologies into the home extends the carceral state into domestic space.
A Beacon of Futurity and a Balm of Security
Guadalupe Maravilla makes multimedia art to grapple with his “traumatic experiences” as a unaccompanied child and undocumented migrant.
How the Campus Becomes the Border
Since all data can now be used for immigration enforcement, universities cannot assume that collecting data on their students is safe.
How the U.S. Weaponized COVID against Migrants
Immigrants in the United States during the pandemic faced the same discrimination, disenfranchisement, violence, and terror as before—only intensified.
The Ten Thousand Things
“I am supposed to be writing this essay, ostensibly on technology, but not for the first time, I believe I am unable to write; and not writing, doubt that I will I ever write again.”
Criminalized Borders and US Health-Care Profits
The pandemic took the health inequalities generated by US imperialism, and made them worse.
What Happens When a Metaphor Becomes Real?
The humanities can reveal the truth of the world’s crises, everything from contagions like the pandemic to apocalypses like right-wing violence.
Like Sands through the Hourglass
What will our children remember of this time, when their play and freedom are confined—or freed—by the digital?