Month: January 2015

  • I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for…

  • frijoliz: todayinlaborhistory: Today in labor history, January 28, 1917: 17-year old house cleaner Carmelita Torres leads what will become known as the “Bath Riots” at the Juarez/El Paso border, refusing the gasoline and chemical “bath” imposed on Mexican workers crossing the border into the U.S. Torres and 30 other women resisted and several hundred people…

  • hyperallergic: The National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) at Southern Methodist University has released its first Arts Vibrancy Index, a report that ranks the cultural vibrancy of communities across the country. The index measures vibrancy in terms of “supply, demand, and government support for arts and culture” per capita, according to the press releaseissued by the NCAR. The number of…

  • Smugglers Use SENTRI Drivers To Move Drugs Across San Diego Border | KPBS

    Smugglers Use SENTRI Drivers To Move Drugs Across San Diego Border | KPBS warrenellis: “Drug smugglers are turning "trusted travelers” into unwitting mules by placing powerful magnetic containers full of drugs under their cars while in Mexico, and then recovering the illegal cargo far from the view of border authorities in the United States.“

  • A point I am making in my dissertation, informed by the work of Indigenous legal theorists like John Borrows, Kahente Horn-Miller, Tracey Lindberg, and Val Napoleon, is that Indigenous thought is not just about social relations and philosophical anecdotes, as many an ethnography would suggest. These scholars have already shown that Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies…

  • cinoh: youmightfindyourself: War rugs are now starting to feature Reaper and Predator drones in their motifs.

  • Sophie Smallhorn (via the absolute ART blog…) 

  • When shirts cost $3,500

    mostlysignssomeportents: An eye-popping parable about the benefits of automation: 200 years ago, it took 479 hours worth of labor to make a shirt (spinning, weaving, sewing), or $3,472.75 at $7.25/hour. It’s one thing to heart that the automatic loom brought about a huge economic boom, it’s another thing to contemplate just how difficult material objects…

  • newyorker: In this video, Richard Brody discusses François Truffaut’s 1966 film “Fahrenheit 451”: As a futuristic science-fiction film, the project opens the door to abstractions—visual as well as intellectual—that had been remote from Truffaut’s earlier films. Critics and viewers didn’t forgive him for surprising them; the film remains audaciously surprising even now.