Bossnappings are a symbolically potent tactic in the arsenal of labor militancy, especially now that workers are increasingly required to identify with their management.
Like Nas captured the energy of his New York, I wanted to capture the energy of my West Virginia.
The best interviews from the past year.
Sean Stewart (Babylon Falling)
As a little kid all my real life heroes were outlaws, self-styled and otherwise.
Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates does not write to blunt edges. He writes so that it might be possible to slice away the protective illusions that obscure the brutal reality of blackness in America.
Bloodletting in Minor Scales – Justin Limoli
The dismissal of “heaviness” from experimental or mainstream quarters alike is an evasion.
The Resilience of/to Sleaford Mods
Rihanna is neither the un-investible noise of resistance nor the efficient investment of resilience, but rather the inefficiency of melancholy.
A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin
Berlin’s stories examine the consequences of living as if one were free when one is, because female, necessarily not.
A first-person narrator is allowed to be unreliable. The voice is like a dirty windshield at night in the rain. Even if all you see is glare and blobs, you assume whatever’s out there is real. But the second an omniscient narrator makes a continuity mistake, readers want to kick its ass.
Is the self what we’ve lived through, what we’ve felt and thought? Is it what we have written? What part of the self browses the Internet? What is that self trying to get to?