Ian Urbina, author of The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier and organizer of the Outlaw Ocean Project just collaborated with the Los Angeles Times on a video and piece explaining how the sea is a dystopian place: “Too big to police and under no clear international authority, immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation.” You can see the video after the jump here. What follows directly is another short video Urbina posted last summer…
Grindstone
Chinese Workers Turn to US Marijuana Industry as Service Jobs Dry Up
A Chinese immigrant is facing drug charges after two unrelated raids in New Mexico uncovered a marijuana processing operation, a network of purported hemp farms, and dozens of Chinese immigrants who had been laboring amid tons of marijuana.
The Bitter Logician and The Trimmer: Rereading Allen Grossman and Eugene Goodheart in My Middle Age
Penniless and nearing thirty circa 1990, the one ace up my sleeve was that I “worked with Grossman.” Grossman. The Brandeis English department’s quite literal resident “genius” poet and pedagogue. In August 1989, Allen R. Grossman had in fact received a John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur “Genius” Grant. Needless to say, I owned no mutual funds back then, but Grossman’s stock was on the rise when he was my doctoral adviser.
Souls Grown Deeper: The Legacy of New Communities Land Trust
Corso’s Shirt (Poverty & Poetry)
What follows is a brief excerpt from Robert Creeley on the Poet’s Work, in conversation with & photographs by Bruce Jackson–a new book documenting a Q&A between Jackson and Creeley that took place in 2001. In the passage below, Jackson’s prompts are bolded.
The Life of Little Richard and Deaths of Despair (A Review of Six Reports on the American Grind)
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, 2020.
The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovitz, 2019.
On the Clock, Emily Guendelsberger, 2019.
A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey, 2020.
the case for A JOB GUARANTEE, Pavlina Tcherneva, 2020.
A Brief History of Fascist Lies, Federico Finchelstein, 2020.
Future’s So Bright I Need VR Goggles
I still feel the hunger after all these years. The pangs spark at the strangest times—as attention wanes at co-worker’s oft-told story; ascent 302 of the thousand times I climb my apartment staircase, moments of confusion amidst a girl’s mixed signals. I want to go back to that safe, warm, strong place of my childhood. I want to play video games again.
Dreams Fade Into the Everblue: Lori McKenna’s Bygone Humanism
“Here is what I know” is the first line of “A Mother Never Rests,” the opening track off country singer Lori McKenna’s latest LP. “Even when she’s sleeping she’s still dreaming about you”–her voice is weary yet sure of wisdoms both received and earned. McKenna dives into the laundry-list of domestic chores and anxieties expected of a mother in red-state America.
What Is It ‘Bout Men: Toward a More Nuanced Response to #MeToo
I confess I have very complex and conflicted feelings about #MeToo’s virtual movement.
The Red Impala
Nunez, Calderon, and Luis (that’s me), we found an old Chevy Impala, a real big one from the Fifties. It was in the sandbox in front of the kids’ playground next to the project in which we lived. Calderon is very smart. He got a job selling bets at OTB, and we really trusted his judgment. “Nunez, Luis,” he said, “the car has no plates on it. The radio and battery are gone. It is safe to assume that it is abandoned.”
Feasting on a Fiend
And so, the monster that is Harvey Weinstein has been banished, and soon, perhaps, he will be incarcerated. Troops of celebrities have rushed to condemn him, some claiming ignorance about his m.o. and nearly all expressing horror. It’s been a long time since the word disgusting was used by so many men who, if the tropes of pornography are to be believed, harbor fantasies very close to what Weinstein acted upon. I suspect that the conflict between what men and women feel sexually (which isn’t a single thing) and what we feel politically (which is) reflects a climate of anxiety amplified by social media and by newspapers and TV shows that have everything to gain from scandalizing. The result has been a two-edged sword. There’s a real struggle against sexual oppression and a more ambiguous fostering of uneasiness about sex that is potentially as oppressive as the situation it is meant to address.
Greening King
The author of the following post is C.E.O. of BlocPower—a black enterprise that cultivates green energy projects in under-served communities. (BlocPower is a business that’s shaped by a social commitment: “at every point in our value chain we seek out and hire underemployed workers from vulnerable communities.”)
One of my favorite sermons by Dr. King is called “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart.” It starts: “A French philosopher once said that ‘No man is so strong unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked’…
The Origin of the Species
Emory University’s nosite.org has reblogged “Origin of the Species”—first posted here in mid-August, 2016.[1] Author Mark Dudzic wrote a brief intro for nosite, which includes post-election reflections. You can read his update below (along with his original post and an appended editor’s note).
Prodigal Fathers
Fathers are universal. We’ve all had one, and some of us have had more. In my case I had the same one three times. By that I mean…Well, maybe I ought to start from the beginning.
Norton’s Big Check
This story poem about a working class hero’s lost weekend, which First originally published in 2012, is a favorite of Mark Dudzic and it brings home class struggles that inform Dudzic’s analysis of Trumpism. (See Mr. D.’s post below.) Like Dudzic, Smucker is alive to the difference between the collective idea that still shapes aspects of working class culture and the ethos of “The Golden Boy on the Way Up.”
Smucker finds lyricism in lives at risk of being trumped now, if only in the society of spectacle. Whenever this editor re-reads “Norton’s Big Check,” I’m reminded of Hemingway’s memorable mockery of proletarian lit in the bar scene late in To Have and Have Not. But “Norton’s Big Check” is no joke. Though it’s not solemn. It even has something like a happy ending. While Smucker isn’t beamish, that finish is a sign he believes in more than Hem’s nada. B.D.
Why the Verizon Strike Matters
I’m a 1946 baby boomer. As a birthday present a friend once gave me a copy of LIFE magazine published the week I was born, a peek into the new world of post-war prosperity I would grow up in. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby dance across the cover, while inside Winston Churchill ponders and Rita Hayworth lounges amidst the ads for whiskey, toothpaste, gas stoves and a full page promise from the Bell Telephone System: “We are short of Long Distance telephone circuits now but we plan to add 2,100,000 miles of them to the Bell System in the next twelve months.”
And one surprise: a seven page section titled The Great Steel Strike Begins with a full page profiling the strikers, including the president of Local 1397 and his retired steelworker immigrant father across from a full page photo of a surviving participant in the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike at “the monument to his old friends who lost their lives.” No pictures of frustrated managers, no pictures of angry consumers, no pictures of resolute right-wing politicians. All this in LIFE magazine, the network news of ‘46.