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Contraband

Columns

The Art of War
April 06, 2017
So many American writers and artists are critical of Trump but not of the American state, or even of America itself.

Accessorized for the Apocalypse
March 13, 2017
In prepping scenes, the sheer weight and volume of things, an essential part of the North American experience for a while now, is recorded and imagined in a different time. Things are arced from abundance to scarcity, reinvented with meaning, imparted with an aura that they do ...

Borderline Delusion
February 16, 2017
No room in this history for settler colonialism and slavery, none for the importation of cheap, easily exploited labor in the “on” periods, for the racial exclusions of the “off” periods expressed in a preference for white European populations.

The Festival of Compromise
January 25, 2017
If, in some counterfactual universe, the Maharajah of Jaipur had married the Queen of England and sent their progeny to study at Harvard, the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, which ran over the weekend, is exactly the sort of cultural jamboree you’d expect the multicultural ...

A Tax on Shivering
January 09, 2017
If one of the functions of writing is to make the reader see, and see again, here is a brief list of what John Berger made visible. Paintings, photographs, advertisements, motorcycles, swimming pools, the aging body, migrating workers, and mass demonstrations; the intricate ...