We sold ten-dollar juice to people who say, “fuck the rules” while, simultaneously, making the rules.
Portraits, Ghosts, and Winters
Though there are days when I can see snow on the peaks of the San Gabriel mountains, the only other way I know how to have a feeling of winter is to see an image of it in a painting or movie, or to read it, and sometimes to write it. I admit that I write and read partly for escape, or maybe to travel is a better way to say it.
After Before: El Libro de Carmen Boullosa
As I’ve gotten to know Carmen Boullosa’s work, her invisibility has become harder to take.
This Week in Sports: In Praise of Hack-a-Drummond
Would anyone watch basketball if it had no ethical component — i.e., if it were without mistakes, without some intimation of the fact that the players are as fragile as we are? Could our excitement for the game withstand a lack of blunderers, choke-artists, and scapegoats? Would there be such a thing as a game if no one ever missed?
Blood you can wash off. But not whiteness. It’s underneath the blood.
When we try to flip through any one of the volumes lining the desert island’s shore, we find that its pages have been bleached by sun and surf.
What Machines Know: Surveillance Anxiety and Digitizing the World
Mass surveillance and predictive policing are all the rage. And in the act of performing identity online, ordinary people help make the world more machine-readable. Why do we play along?
Is the bossless office egalitarian, or does it simply camouflage inequalities and portend the further erosion of organized labor?
Bossnappings are a symbolically potent tactic in the arsenal of labor militancy, especially now that workers are increasingly required to identify with their management.
Albert Murray and the Americas
It’s appropriate that at the end of Murray’s century, when life is particularly low, dirty, and shameful, to have him remind us to pull it together and stomp.