- From the Editors: A Habit of Freedom
An awareness of the drills that reinforce our own false notions is a good place to begin developing a habit of freedom today. So much of our material, tools, and art reinforce the virtual drills by which cultures of surveillance, secrecy, and warfare proliferate. We have gotten as used to participating in surveillance as we have to ongoing, low-intensity, borderless wars fought from consoles not unlike our own workstations.
- Seeing Surveillance: in conversation with Kazys Varnelis and Trevor Paglen
If you build a surveillance society, you create a giant power imbalance between the people and the state. That’s kind of an abstract thing to point out, but the whole point of a democratic society is that people have more power than the state. When you create mechanisms where that is not true, then you are creating a situation in which a democratic society is increasingly difficult to approach and maintain.
- The Drone Problem: in conversation with Micah Zenko
Signature strikes are the ugly secret of what I call the “Third War,” which is the post-9/11 strikes in non-battlefield settings. The premise behind signature strikes is that the U.S. can lawfully target individuals who, through network analysis and patterns of observable behavior, are believed to belong to militant groups posing a direct threat to a range of interests. These are not people who are on “kill lists,” or people who have been identified as high-value targets. These are anonymous individuals. We don’t know who they are.
- Bergman in ‘68: Evisioning Disaster in Shame by Alison Kozberg
Instead of encouraging a retreat into the past, Shame acknowledges how the logic underlying society’s successes also precipitates its failures.
- Marches of Nations by G.K.Peatling and Elizabeth Murphy
The strength of the common human bond that binds...silent millions to others across official national boundaries is a telling criticism of mainstream discourses and practices of national identity and sovereignty.
- “A Kind of Freedom,” Telling Stories About War, in conversation with J.A. Moad, II
All trauma is burden, so many people are afraid of thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it, going to that place, because it brings up the hurt. But when they’re writing, you can see it’s a kind of freedom. And it provides vets with a different space than they get with the “support our troops” and “salute to service” kind of recognition of their experiences.- Unfinished Revolutions: Revising Goodman's Growing Up Absurd
in conversation with Taylor Stoehr
There’s an important difference between experience and information. The schools teach mostly information. And information is great. But it’s not experience—it never gets to the heart, and it never gets in your bones. The culture goes dead without nature in it.
- Poetry by Fanny Howe and Taylor Stoehr
- Thinking through the Savage Machinery:
Peter Temin and Economic Crises by Dan Monaco
Temin’s pessimism is rooted in a belief that the international economy is reliving the 1930s, with the political situation in the United States in some ways akin to that of the Weimar period in Germany. “I don’t think the outcomes will be as extreme,” Temin says. “But the similarities are there.”