- From the Editors: Last Ditch
More obscured than George’s grave are the key concepts of his life’s work, which his own city has neglected perhaps more than any other. Most notably, his proposal for the common ownership of land and natural resources to the benefit of all citizens is nowhere to be found in a city ever more on the vanguard of new extremes in profit-maximizing development projects.
- Against the
Renting of Persons
in conversation with
David Ellerman
No matter what contract you sign, you’re still a human. You could sign a contract to be a horse or a donkey, but you’re still a human. If we say, well, you’ll obey your master, and we’ll count that as your part of fulfilling the contract, and the other part of your fulfilling the contract is that you only have the rights of a horse, or a slave, or whatever it is—that’s basically legalized fraud. The inalienability is not just moral, it’s factual. You cannot turn yourself into a part-time horse or non-person to actually fulfill such a contract.
- A House Is Not a Home: Dreaming about Property in America
by Alison Kozberg
It is worthwhile to consider how the home’s longstanding hold on American hearts and minds has often served to further stratify wealth, and to separate people based on race, class, and criminality.
- African Americans and Place in White America
in conversation with Robert Hawkins
We don’t pick the spaces and the spaces don’t belong to us. The spaces were not made for us—the spaces were made to place us in.
- Towards a Greener Death
in conversation with Suzanne Kelly
In some ways, green burial is about going back to the old ways, the way we buried our dead before death became industrialized in the U.S. At its most basic, a green burial ground allows for the burial of the body without those conventional practices. But there are other aims to the Green Burial Movement. One of the greatest aims can actually be found in the origins of the movement, the focus on land conservation.
- Poetry by Lynn Stanley, William Stanley, Keith Althaus
- Teaching Subversion: A Response to the “Crisis of the Humanities”
by Michael Fisher
To live in the modern world, it seems we have to learn to depend on experts and the principle of scientific management. Otherwise we’ll be left behind in a fog of bad smells and other inefficiencies.
- The Relationships Industry
by G.K. Peatling
We are reaching a faith in technology’s ability to provide us with certainty in a sense comparable in its relationship to the structures of our experience and worldview to that provided by magic in the Middle Ages.