Pigment presses out
you in
you
laurel
not yet in the wind

When these coins get given out, they are a physical reminder of the fact that the military is not some faceless monolithic structure. The coins show that the military is an organization made of human beings.

Homeownership, as it has evolved in the United States, often turns its beneficiaries against progress and change.

How economic incentives drive the political emotions of American homeowners.

A gray hoodie will not protect my son…

The real point of FDR’s New Deal was to save democracy.

poverty and hunger, racism and sexism, drug use and violence, and climate change, to name just a few: Why do these problems exist? What are their effects? What can be done about them?

Now over a decade old and mostly from the U.S. perspective, the text is still an adequate introduction to various problems in modern society and the ways that sociologists tend to think about them.

She was nearing the river—in reaching the brink,
She heeded no danger, she paused not to think!
For she is a mother—her child, a slave—
And she’ll give him his freedom, or find him a grave!

around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house…

For more about this famous poem, you can also hear Pádraig Ó Tuama’s take on it in Poetry Unbound. (I particularly appreciate the way he reads the final lines of the poem).

You know, it would be better if you asked me how I’m sleeping.

A Black and a White American sit down and discuss how racism doesn’t just live in our minds and institutions, but also lives in (yes, all) our bodies.

… policy with intentional marketing titles.
Assimilation; Relocation; Termination…

The hefty steel speaker we hooked
over the passenger seat window.

Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it.

I mean, thank God that the people that run this world are not smart enough to keep running it forever.

A short news article about Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Resturant.”

It tells the story of how Guthrie was arrested and fined for a simple act of kindness and how this record kept him from being drafted into the Vietnam War. Since being released in 1967, the song has become a Thanksgiving Day staple across the United States.

People change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others’ changes.

How public opinion in the United States has actually shifted over the last few decades, and how well (or not) those shifts correlate with mass discourse.

We’re living in a time-travel golden age. But why? What happened to time?

A short history of time travel, including the Yahoo time capsule and the birthday party Steven Hawking only announced after the fact.

… a call to a hotline of sorts, though one I’d never heard about before and was surprised to learn existed…

It used to embarrass me when my father talked back to the TV.

For most of the shift, it was more about not looking
bored or wanting to seem invisible behind the ER desk
while nothing much happened at all…

Though it wasn’t the only time that I went home and cried during that week.

[Three] stories where people are like, ‘oh, I’m going to be the one to fix that.’ And only later did they really discover, to their surprise, what that can really entail. Even when you think you see things coming, you’ve got it under control, that’s who you are, you do not see things coming.

Loneliness in America isn’t merely the result of inevitable or abstract forces, like technological progress; it’s the product of social structures we’ve chosen

Glenwood, Irvington, Scarborough, Poughkeepsie…

… here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along.

… two stories of people trying to figure out what to say or if they should say anything in this moment of backlash.

I’m on the horizon of a seven hour trip and it’s quiet…

i google: can dogs eat watermelon?
       google says: yes, but not the
       seeds…

What kind of creatures are we? And how should we relate to each-other?

Matt joins his friend Sam to talk about an article he wrote on depression and politics.

There is some sinister hysteria in the air out here tonight, some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come.

How does one say “what if” without reproach?

A kaleidoscopic meditation on race, identity, culture, and deep listening.

Every other rights struggle that we have seen—disability rights, gay rights, women’s rights—all come from the efforts of the black civil rights struggles. […] It is black people who have been the perfectors of democracy.

The history of The United States, retold beautifully and powerfully in three emotional hours.

To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.

A book about how our trusting and generous nature has been systematically undermined by aggressive policies and its tragic consequences for Sandra Bland and our society as a whole.

I recommend starting with chapter three (available for free here!) and four and then skipping ahead to the last two chapters because the middle chapters are awful and the first couple simply aren’t important. These four chapters (3, 4, 11, and 12) give you all the meat of the book while sparing you some horrific and unnecessary diversions into e.g. pedophilia.

While the monograph exists in written form, I recommend listening to the audiobook. With archival recordings of the original interviews used wherever the book quotes a primary source (or actors where such recordings don’t exist), original music, and narration by, of course, the author himself, the book sounds more like a slick podcast than a scripted robot. Hopefully the future of audiobooks!

… the vast majority of Americans (97 percent) are forfeiting the chance to enhance their well-being by practicing real generosity with their money.

A cautionary tale about how hard it is to rise from the bottom to the top–and why the American school system, despite its best efforts, continues to leave an extraordinary amount of talent on the table.

For part two of this miniseries, see Food Fight.

Belief systems and abstract commitments are, of course, indispensable to social change. But when this isolated interiority becomes the sovereign justification for political action, there are only two possible conclusions: either a quietist withdrawal for endless self-reflection or a dangerous willingness to achieve political ends through violent means.

… today’s rich are far less materialistic, but a far greater threat to equality

A fascinating interview on social signaling today—its historical causes and its implications for inequality, policy, and society as a whole.

Forget you. This is about waiting

A poem which shakes ‘work’ from its masculine frame and recenters it, not on you, on your brother.

The rate of change is visibly unsustainable. The profiteers call this process “disruption,” while commentators on the left generally call it “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism.” Millennials know it better as “the world,” or “America,” or “Everything.” And Everything sucks.

Explaining the economic moment we are caught in, its tangled roots, and the challenges of trying to fight our collective, exponential momentum.

Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context–randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out “I swear to God!” is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship.

An astonishingly good book of poetry describing the contemporary African American experience and how “race” emerges in relation.

I had this sureal sense of vertigo where I felt like I was constantly teetering over the edge of something that I didn’t understand. The entire town was built on top of bombs.

Leah Zani discusses her field work in Laos, where the CIA secretly carried out the largest bombing campaign in history, and how she navigated and charted this delicate history of military waste.