Field Notes
Trouble in Paradise
By Matthew ByrneCabin fever is consuming us. We’ve all gone a bit stir-crazy. Like many before the pandemic struck, I had plans, but they were dashed in February. Or was it March? The months dissolve into each other. I was supposed to touch down in “the Garden Island” on Hawaiian Airlines in mid-November, flying into Līhuʻe from Oakland International Airport. A Hawaiian November would have been quite unlike a San Franciscan autumn, when the Bay’s chill blankets the city and its coastline.
My Beautiful City
By Thomas HeiseIn the spring of 2020, as the plague was sweeping the city, I found myself several times a day staring at an Instagram page dedicated to the furniture and household goods New Yorkers were tossing to the curb. Amongst the flotsam and jetsam were steamer trunks, benches of reclaimed lumber, numerous upright pianos, boxes upon boxes of books, a fainting couch with flower upholstery, glass vanities, bar stools, two Noguchi coffee tables, stand-up globes (I counted at least three) that hatched open at the meridian so you could store liquor inside, seemingly every fiddle leaf fig tree in the five boroughs, and other bric-a-brac and impedimenta and whatever else could be quickly discarded in a desperate effort to get out of New York as fast as possible.
Community Policing Is Not The Solution To Racist Police Violence
By Oliver HindsIn the summer of 2014 an NYPD officer choked Eric Garner to death in an altercation that began because the officer suspected that Garner was selling loose cigarettes. Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” were caught on a video that captured the attention of the country and, along with the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement to the forefront of the nation’s attention.
Corona is the virus, Capitalism is the pandemic, what do we do next?
By Philip RIZKIn between shifts of exploring the world with my nearing two-years-old son, I managed to finalize my latest film, Mapping Lessons, this summer. I spent four years deeply enjoying exploring a world history of local governance as alternatives to the nation state, particularly in the Levant, trying to answer the question, how do we prepare now for the next time?
