Essays Archive - Page 73 of 131

Detroit’s Project Green Light and the “New Jim Code”

Why video surveillance and digital technology intensify racism

October 1, 2020 • by Vince Carducci

————— Over the last three and a half years, the City of Detroit has greatly expanded Project Green Light, an initiative of the Detroit Police Department (DPD), along with local businesses and other organizations, to use video surveillance and digital technology to fight crime. Since the first cameras went live in ...

Detroit’s Project Green Light and the “New Jim Code”

History

Muscovite

An excerpt from “The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time”

October 1, 2020 • by Hugh Raffles

During the years I was writing this book, my mother began to lose her memory, or, as she often said, she started “getting stupid.” I traveled frequently to London at this time, and on one of these trips visited the house in Belsize Park in which Sigmund Freud spent the ...

North America

Joe Biden Faces Down the Fascist Donald Trump

Biden’s “Will you shut up, man” is the signature takeaway line from the debate

September 30, 2020 • by John Stoehr

CNN’s Jake Tapper is a highly conventional and thus highly respected news anchor. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro is a venomous toad beneath contempt and unworthy of recognition. In setting them side-by-side I risk tarnishing Tapper’s good name, but it’s worth it to make a point about the press corps’ ...

Joe Biden Faces Down the Fascist Donald Trump

History

Oh Say Can You Sing?

Why America has the national anthem it deserves

September 29, 2020 • by Ginger Dellenbaugh

For years there have been calls to replace the national anthem with something more appropriate, more modern, more singable. Suggestions have ranged from the stalwart "America the Beautiful" to, most recently, Bill Wither’s "Lean on Me." As physical monuments around the country are being dismantled or questioned for their relevance, shouldn’t ...

Politics

I Am Ignoring Amy Coney Barrett

And you should too — because she will be confirmed, Trump is trolling us with this nomination, and we have an election to win

September 28, 2020 • by Claire Potter

I doubt that Barrett drinks a lot of beer or is prone to nasty sexual behaviors. The only thing that could stop her confirmation is a new and damaging revelation about the charismatic, evangelical Catholic group, People of Praise, to which she and her family belong. This is unlikely, and ...

Capitalism

QAnon as a Byproduct of a Broken America

Alienation, anxiety, and religion

September 28, 2020 • by Martin Shuster

QAnon is a conspiracy theory alleging that the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is battling an organized and criminal deep state—which also happens to be a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles engaged in sex-trafficking—and that this battle is moving towards an apocalyptic showdown in which our president will ...

QAnon as a Byproduct of a Broken America

Uncategorized

Against Biopolitics

Compensation and Confinement: Entombing the Academic Left

September 25, 2020 • by Angel Octavio Alvarez Solis and Gonzalo Bustamante Moya

Biopolitics rules, but does not govern. Even if some thinkers have insisted on describing its explicative limits or have tried to grasp the implications of accepting its truth, biopolitics is still the main tone that characterizes contemporary public opinion. What is so fascinating or productive about explaining pandemics in biopolitical ...

Democracy

Restoring vs. Packing the Court

Metaphors Matter

September 25, 2020 • by Robert Ivie

With the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the likelihood of her quick replacement by yet another Trump nominee, talk of packing the Supreme Court has intensified. Of course, all such talk is rendered politically impracticable if Democrats fail to sweep the 2020 election. Even if Democrats should win control of ...

Activism

Remembering and Resisting the Age of Reagan

An activist historian advises his students that the choices they make now will shape their future

September 24, 2020 • by James Goodman

______ It was November 1980, two months after my girlfriend and I moved to New York City from Boston, where we had met a year before. I had just started in the M.F.A. program at Columbia and she had just started a job at a small press, managing the production of ...

Remembering and Resisting the Age of Reagan

Race

Anti Bodies

Two American Pandemics

September 24, 2020 • by Rossen Ventzislavov

------- We now live in a time when the line between being a nobody and a somebody can be drawn by an antibody. Humanity is split. And so is the screen of our double American crisis—one channel nervously tracking a global pandemic, the other crackling with eruptions of civil unrest. But ...

Uncategorized

Is America Going Down Like Custer?

When defiance is the coin of the realm

September 24, 2020 • by Deanne Stillman

These flags are not just warnings posted in their front yards or near fences at the edge of their property. They are a statement of identity, a definition of self, one that manifests whenever it feels threatened or is called forth. And now, that thing we all learned in third grade ...

Politics

Trump’s Sadistic Spectacle of Winners and Losers

When Americans learned to idolize the rich and famous, they also came to secretly despise themselves

September 23, 2020 • by Arlene Stein

The answer: they revile losers and simultaneously fear becoming losers themselves. Trump watchers know that “loser” is the president’s favorite term of derision. According to the Trump Twitter Archive, 328 of Trump’s tweets castigate “losers.” They are an eclectic lot. Some are the president’s critics, on the right and the left, ...

Essays

Detroit’s Project Green Light and the “New Jim Code”

Why video surveillance and digital technology intensify racism

Muscovite

An excerpt from “The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time”

Joe Biden Faces Down the Fascist Donald Trump

Biden’s “Will you shut up, man” is the signature takeaway line from the debate

Oh Say Can You Sing?

Why America has the national anthem it deserves

I Am Ignoring Amy Coney Barrett

And you should too — because she will be confirmed, Trump is trolling us with this nomination, and we have an election to win

QAnon as a Byproduct of a Broken America

Alienation, anxiety, and religion

Against Biopolitics

Compensation and Confinement: Entombing the Academic Left

Restoring vs. Packing the Court

Metaphors Matter

Anti Bodies

Two American Pandemics

Is America Going Down Like Custer?

When defiance is the coin of the realm

Trump’s Sadistic Spectacle of Winners and Losers

When Americans learned to idolize the rich and famous, they also came to secretly despise themselves

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