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 Which acts one is consenting to, what happens if consent is withdrawn in media res— such questions might suggest that consent is being asked to do too much.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

In the series’ penultimate episode, Mad Men’s depressive hausfrau Betty Draper trips in a  stairwell on the Fairfield University campus and discovers she’s  dying.  Lung cancer at thirty-eight: unusual in a woman her age but not, perhaps, inconceivable. Is the metaphor obvious? Subjected to the “non-existence” of the housewife (to crib a different Betty–Friedan), the structural suppression of her personhood has generated in Mad Men’s Betty a metastasizing interior rot. But before this, Betty is  a cigarette adman’s celluloid dream: a Hitchcock blonde gone trad, nearly never ..read more

  In South Dekalb County, Georgia, the South River forest forms a canopy so lush and life-giving that it is referred to as one of the “four lungs of Atlanta.” This sprawl of green space was known as “Welaunee” by the native Muscogee people, who were forcibly displaced in the 1830’s. Swaths of Welaunee Forest were settled and cleared to make way for a cotton plantation. This history encapsulates the twinned imperatives of the American colonial project: the displacement and genocide of indigenous populations and the stolen labor of enslaved Africans. Today, the Welaunee forest is once agai ..read more

Indigenous Justice on Movement Memos On November 23, thousands of Indigenous people and allies participated in the annual Indigenous Peoples’ Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering on Alcatraz Island organized by the International Indian Treaty Council. These gatherings began in 1975, first to honor the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island by Native activists, and, later, to counter popular narratives of Thanksgiving as a peaceful convening of native people and colonizers. This year’s assembly had another function, too: solidarity with Palestine. In a new episode of Kelly Hayes ..read more

Protean Mag: Letters From Gaza In collaboration with The Institute for Palestine Studies, Protean magazine has been publishing translated messages from Gaza sent amid the current bombing campaign. An excerpt from Reema Saleh, a student awaiting updates from her family in Gaza: At noon, the sound of an F-16 bomb interrupted a phone call with my mother. I couldn’t remember what she was even telling me. I knew exactly what that sound was from experience. I was cut off from my family for the rest of that day. My neighbor’s house was bombed and collapsed on its residents. “They bombed Ala ..read more