A grinning young couple points upward toward a caption reading “our simple seggs aftercare routine.” They playact the steps: shower, snuggle, bed. Scroll: next video, a woman in sunglasses tells us, “once again in Central Florida, Yahtzees are out in numbers protesting.” Behind her, green-screened, a photo of men in red shirts and black masks, holding flags emblazoned with swastikas. TikTok is home to a mirror-lexicon, a distinct vocabulary that has arisen in response to the platform’s intense and often inscrutable censorship. In this newly conventionalized glossary of euphemisms, sex becomes ..read more

I think about The Zone of Interest (2023) while I am making my kids’ lunches, running their baths, folding laundry. Similar domestic routines make up much of the film’s action, the center of its study of how the institution of the family confers a mirage of humanity and morality onto its participants. Saturated in soft light, Broderie anglaise linen drying on a clothesline in the sunshine, the film shares an aesthetic with Julie Blackmon’s whimsical photographs of domestic life, and the Höss’s backyard recalls Esther Greenwood’s observation in The Bell Jar that a neighbor’s lawn is strewn with ..read more

courtesy Taylor Miller It was dusk for kilometers and bats in the lavender sky, like spiders when a fly is caught, began to appear. And there, not the promised land, but barbwire and barbwire with nothing growing under it. [from Javier Zamora’s “Saguaros”] There are currently more than 170 encampments—from Humboldt to Río Piedras, San Juan…Kyoto to Te Wānanga o Aotearoa where students and allies are co-creating present and future spaces of learning, of revolution. The urgency to document the demands for boycott, divestment, sanctions, arms/energy embargo and the multitudes of direct actions, a ..read more

Intro You've may have seen Hindu Indians expressing their sycophantic admiration for Israel—both online under posts about Zionists as well is in parades and marches. But the relationship between Israel and India is more complex than is implied by all the memes about Indians stanning Israel. For Indians, Israel presents an internationally sanctioned model for exterminating Muslims. For the Indian state, Israel offers a fruitful arms alliance and template for maintaining surveillant occupation. And while online Indians may receive racist retorts by Israelis scorning any affinity between them, th ..read more

Intro In the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic—one that begat many a mommy thinkpiece, many a motherhood memoir, almost all of which decried and valorized the hard work of mothering—Premilla Nadasen’s latest book, which delves into the care economy of the US, could not have arrived sooner. Nadasen, a distinguished historian of labor and grassroots organizing, challenges readers to scrutinize the way contemporary care discourse centers white, middle-class families. Care: The Highest Form of Capitalism (Verso, 2023) reorients this discourse away from the white nuclear family towards those w ..read more

This interview was edited for clarity and length and a shorter version originally appeared in the print edition of The New York War Crimes. The New York War Crimes: Tell us about the first day of the occupation. Cal Poly Humboldt: The plan was to have a Seder. It was Passover. A number of Jewish students had brought, you know, big buckets of Matzo ball soup. Around 4:30 in the afternoon, we entered Siemens Hall for what we thought would be a pretty calm occupation. Instead, we were immediately met with confrontation from university police. People had their chairs ripped from under them and we ..read more

In the early morning of April 30, 2024, we liberated Hamilton Hall at Columbia University. Nearly two weeks earlier, hundreds of people had constructed the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Butler Lawn, under constant threats of police abuse and university discipline. This encampment helped spark a global movement against the role of universities in imperialist-Zionist genocide. By moving from the lawn and liberating a university building, we escalated our tactics to apply greater pressure on the administration and to inspire others to take bold action. Here is our statement: We took Hamilton Hal ..read more

In sex as elsewhere, consent is asked to do a lot. It is a kind of moral magic, legal theorist Heidi Hurd has suggested, that makes all kinds of unthinkable incursions permissible, from fondling and penetration to degradation and physical violence.  On the other hand, consent is notoriously fickle. Are words necessary for consent, or are glances enough? Which acts one is consenting to, what happens if consent is withdrawn in media res— such questions might suggest that consent is being asked to do too much. It may be clarifying, too, to separate out two types of consent—on the one hand is ..read more

Fady Joudah’s poems are exquisite yet ungovernable, rebelliously innovative yet attuned to a broad range of traditions. They spoke to me long before I had the pleasure of meeting their author or the honor to call him a friend. I have worked with Fady as an editor on several occasions, saving our exchanges—both in my files and in my mind—as private lessons not only in the verbal arts he and I both practice, but also in the art of conducting oneself in the world with uncompromising dignity. His latest collection, […], was composed over three brutal months of Israel’s war on the Palestinian ..read more

A revolution in education! A resuscitation of the university mission! To happen in, of all places, not the pompous old northeast or the debauched West Coast, not New York or California but the country’s southern reaches—in the Texas Hill Country, in the city of Austin, where already technologists and venture capitalists had swarmed, drawn by the absence of income tax and the looseness of labor regulations, pulled by the mild zoning laws and the natural beauty and the food trucks and the good vibes. Austin, because it was “a hub for builders, mavericks, and creators.” Here a new university: the ..read more