- From the Editors: Our Land
On Trevor Paglen and Woody Guthrie.
- Muddling Towards the Next Crisis: James Kenneth Galbraith in conversation with The Straddler
If I were designing the boilerplate rhetoric of a popular movement, I would take a blue pencil to these statistical formulations. I don't like the stagnant median wage argument—I think it obscures what actually happened. And I don't particularly care for the "one percent" argument. I understand it has a certain power, but one can be much more precise about what it is you want to attack, and what it is you want to preserve and to build. I would cut to the chase: we need to tear down the financial sector and rebuild it from scratch in a very different way.
-
The Last Secrets: Trevor Paglen in conversation with The Straddler
Most people think of secrecy as being about what you get to know versus what you don't get to know. I don't think about it that way at all. Secrecy is about economies, political institutions, juridical conventions, buildings, jobs, budgets, all organized in a political way that is very different from the rest of the state.
- Poetry by Dell Lemmon, Frederick Speers, and Nathan Gunsch
- If No Towel Turn Knob: The Monument of Proper English
by Josh Lederman
From a linguistic point of view, all language dialects/varieties are functionally equal, even while they are socially and politically hierarchical.
- Fiction: After the Election: PLAN 12 by Eddie Lombardi and Todd Pate
- Can't Lose Counterfactuals: On Elections, Commentary, and Comparisons by Daniel Schensul
Lack of clarity gives immense argumentative power to those who analyze our politics for a living: on their terms it becomes basically impossible to disagree without making counterclaims of basically the same type. And all of these bad counterfactuals are also utterly free of what little consequence there is in being wrong, because for once pundits are trying to explain the past rather than predict the future.
- The Consultant We Deserve: Barack Obama & the American Enterprise
by James Comerford & Dan Monaco
We—divided as a polity, but united by our continued taste for credit, cheap gasoline, industrial strength freezers in the garage (in case we need them one day), lights on in rooms we've left, palettes of gadgetry, and oceans of waste—who remain cautiously optimistic about the future, still believing our children will be better off than we are, still approaching climate change as either unreal or something that will eventually have to be faced—is Barry not the one we were expecting? If not, just who were we expecting?