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Chelsea Manning’s Existential Threat to American Innocence
January 23, 2017
You know the story: a court-martialed soldier of an unpopular war granted clemency as the very last act of a U.S. president amid great public controversy. I refer, of course, to Lt. William Calley, the soldier of the Vietnam War who on March 16, 1968 led the systematic slaughter ...

Daily Bafflements
January 20, 2017
• Today in presidential aesthetics: commentators weigh in on Trump’s selection of (two!) bibles for his swearing-in and an oil painting takes aim at Obama in a bizarre echo of Trump’s promise that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be ...

Beyond the March
We need things, like national free childcare, paid parental leave like they have in other countries. Two years in these other countries! A minimum fifteen dollars an hour for all women, no exceptions, all sectors of the workforce. We want to save Medicare and expand it to ...

Too Many, Too Many
January 20, 2017
The “European Project”, like the United States, is in need of a regime change. It will be vulnerable to populist condemnation and counteraction until it scraps the elite designs at its origin. In a time when pseudo-revolutions have brought pseudo-regime-change around ...

Daily Bafflements
January 19, 2017
• Betsy DeVos’s hearing was fraught with controversy and moments of complete idiocy—not to mention a brief discussion about bears. The billionaire and education “philanthropist” proved to be incapable of answering basic policy questions, ...

Trump Interruption
We are doing a lot of non-violent direct action trainings. Then, on Wednesday, we are doing a queer dance party at Mike Pence’s house. Thursday there is an action at an Alt-Right Trump inaugural ball called the Deploraball, trying to shut that down. Then, starting on Friday ...

When Uber Bares Its Hoard
January 18, 2017
Uber executives are not just giving over the data, as if it were a peace offering born of their largesse. The data is not just an olive branch; it is bait that lures cities into partnerships formed on Uber’s own terms. The company has dabbled in outreach in recent years and ...

Daily Bafflements
January 17, 2017
• Amid mounting pressure on Obama to pardon whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden this week (update: Manning will be freed in May!) it’s worth revisiting Astra Taylor’s salvo on presidential pardons, and their shady, unofficial ...

Pissologies
January 17, 2017
Why didn’t Donald Trump just piss on the bed himself? Everything else about the story makes sense; it doesn’t really matter whether it’s accurate or not. The rest of the allegations against Trump—that he’s a long-standing Russian asset, that his entire campaign was run ...

Not Unwinnable
January 16, 2017
As a general rule, it’s wise to steer clear from analyzing memes that originate and evolve on the Twittersphere. Users wield the medium in different enough ways that Twitter is at best a fractured discourse, it moves too quickly to be relevant longer than a day, and the ...

Obama Out
This week, the country’s dominant mode of pop-cultural expression was the public speech—something of a throwback trend, given Americans’ patterns of media consumption nowadays. In the smartphone era, we tend not to gather around and listen to our leaders ...

Ungovernable
Once it was clear that he had won the Electoral College, he was going to be the next president of The United States, a point that I raised was “Now we need to prepare to be ungovernable.” That lingered in my head. It is a phrase that I remember picking up from my younger ...