Today is overwhelmingly defined by white-supremacist violence and the whiteness of AI technology. Can seeing them together help defeat them both?
Tag: Violence
“Reality Entails Risks That Fiction Doesn’t Know”: Talking with Everardo González
“There is definitely a line between victims and perpetrators. But that line is not essentially determined.”
Borders Don’t Stop Violence—They Create It
The “border” is not a line on the ground, but a tool to enable violence and surveillance.
Why Play to Regret?
Videogames that demand female protagonists commit—and receive—violence may be captivating, thoughtful, and moral. But they are not fun to play.
Pay Attention When They Tell You to Forget
Remember that anti-Black violence has been the central dynamic of US history—and how Black women have struggled with this violence for centuries.
What Is the Genre of Rape?
While some progress has been made, TV is still trying to figure out how to tell the stories of male-identified rape survivors.
As American as Child Separation
The United States tears families apart—during slavery, in the wars against indigenous people and the war on drugs, and, today, at the border.
On Baltimore: Narratives and City Making
All cities tell a story. But who decides what Baltimore’s next story will be?
The Lyric Me, Too
“The” is a suspect word. It’s small and ubiquitous, but there’s something presumptuous about it. It aggrandizes and abstracts. Unlike “this” and “that,” which also indicate specificity (“this word,” ...
Afterlife of the Troubles
In December 1972, 38-year-old Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was abducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), never to be seen alive by her children again. Her remains weren’t ...
Bleached Atmospheres of Dread
Myles McRae MLA was a monster of male entitlement. Any person who read the Australian newspapers in the year 1891 would have thought so. Six feet tall ...
Borders, Guns, and Freedom
Like the pioneers two hundred years before him, Mark Romano recently decided to head West. Like those pioneers, Mark—a white, unemployed electrician ...
Jewish Fragility
When I receive appeals from Jewish organizations exhorting me to fight antisemitism—which, they claim, is on the rise here and abroad—I tend to toss them away. During many periods of time, and in ...
Afterlife of the Troubles
In December 1972, 38-year-old Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was abducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), never to be seen alive by her children again. Her remains weren’t ...
Female Futures, Future Females
In the midst of an intergalactic war between Earth and an empire of cyborg machines, a mother desperately uploads the consciousness of her dead daughter ...
“Remembering and Forgetting”: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Since the 2015 publication of his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen ...
Disaster Capitalism Strikes Puerto Rico
It has been a year since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving a trail of destruction: ruined infrastructure, destroyed homes, and thousands ...
Public Thinker: Issa Kohler-Hausmann on Misdemeanors and Mass Incarceration
While most critics of the American criminal justice system condemn mass incarceration, fewer have ...
B-Sides: Ivan Olbracht’s “Nikola the Outlaw”
Some of Central Europe’s greatest political novels have been meditations on disillusionment. Many of them—from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to ...
How the “Omega Male” Becomes a Psychopath
Among the many prurient pleasures offered by contemporary literature are thrillers hawking creative mistreatments of women. The subgenre’s prime was the ...