Periscope articles and content
Long ago, on the lip of memory, when wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were offered as ways to deliver the world from terror, I recall reading a report on what U.S. military planners took to be the political limit … Continue reading “Moving Violations”
Rumor/Contagion Here’s a story: In late 2012, a rumour circulated throughout the Bangladeshi community living in and around Mile End, London. A vampire was sucking the blood of children dry. This vampire would strike late at night and in … Continue reading “The Axiomatic of Counter-Terrorism”
In the month of January, 1970, the New York Times published an article, “Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random.” [i] [ii] The lottery to which they were referring, of course, was the “life and death” lottery that selected … Continue reading “Mayberry R.F.D. Will Not Be Presented Tonight”
War appears as eventual. Whether via the state’s incitement of its citizens to hate, fight, and kill or the pacifists’ moral injunctions to lay down arms, to desert or refuse, war waged by states is presented as if it … Continue reading “No War but Class War”
dead land Mewat, waste land, dead land, empty land. Codified in the Ottoman Land Law of 1858, modified in the early 1920s as Britain re-structures the colonial governance of Palestine, and surviving today in the Occupied Territories through a series … Continue reading “a possible history of oblivion”
What’s left to be said about time or space or war? Let’s face it — in the piles of books and papers written on violence in modernity, on time-space compression, on spatialization vs. temporalization, on the militarization of everyday … Continue reading “Sensing Distance: The Time and Space of Contemporary War”
On January 28, 2003 President George W. Bush delivered his third State of the Union Address focusing on global security. In its name, he both defended the U.S. War on Terror invasion of Iraq through lies about weapons of … Continue reading “Securing Blood: PEPFAR and Neoliberal War”
In July of 1945, just as the conclusion of World War II was coming into view, Vannevar Bush, former dean of engineering at MIT, then administrator of the twin war-time revolutions of radar and the atomic bomb, founder of … Continue reading “As We May Think, 2012”
This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence–to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as … Continue reading “Introduction”
First, a word about what these thoughts, and we, are not. We write not as archivists, historians, or even critics of what has been called the Occupy Movement, nor for that matter as particularly historicizing readers of Walt Whitman’s … Continue reading “Never the Usual Terms: A Song for 21st Century Occupations”
Marcia D. works at a suicide prevention center in California. Her job is emotionally draining and requires a great deal of dedication. As with other social workers, Marcia probably got involved in such work because of her commitment to … Continue reading “Burnout, Reaganomics, and the Waning of Empire”
In perhaps the jauntiest Broadway ditty ever written to punctuate that precious moment before everything falls apart — “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” from Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot (1960) — King Arthur and Guinevere, speculate about the amusements … Continue reading “Downton Abbey and the Fantasy of Structured Idleness”
“What does Occupy Wall Street want?” This anxious media meme was yoked to the increase of Occupy protests in 2011. Against the backdrop of other, more angry, characterizations of the Occupy protestors as deservedly unemployed, lazy, or overinvested[1] in idealistic … Continue reading “"Preferring Not To" in the Age of Occupy”
“What if they say I’m no good?” Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) asks his girlfriend Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells) during an early scene from Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future. “What if they say, ‘Get outta here kid, … Continue reading “Back to the Future and the Politics of Potential”
As expected, twenty cigarettes are consumed in James Benning’s latest experimental feature, 20 Cigarettes (2011). In a series of portraits that borrow from (as Benning has explained in interviews) but also depart from Andy Warhol’s iconic Screen Tests, the … Continue reading “Smoke Break”
