You are waiting for the morning bus at the curb. You are getting ready to cross the block at a traffic light. You are stepping out of your house to empty the garbage. You are walking home from a friend’s house at night. Each of these mundane acts could easily be part of the “sidewalk ballet” that the urban thinker and activist Jane Jacobs once praised as the definitive marker of vibrant stranger sociality. But then you get knocked down in front of your bus stop. Some random person punches you in the face at the crosswalk. You get doused with burning acid on the curb in front of your house. You get kidnapped and disappeared before you can reach home. More

The ascendance of Wall Street, and of a managerial bureaucracy (PMC) more generally, largely explains the political realignments that have been playing out in the U.S. Beginning in the 1970s, the American political class made decisions at the behest of business interests and oligarchs to restructure the U.S. economy in ways intended to shift the balance of political and economic power towards capital. Finance was, and still is, the method of affecting this transfer of power. However, the current epoch of finance capitalism has run its course. Its logic has been lost. The threats to the neoliberal order are now internal to it. More

When it comes to destroying Black lives, no modern American institution can match the tobacco industry. It isn’t just that 45,000 Black Americans die of tobacco-related diseases every year; it isn’t just that tobacco use is the main risk factor for the leading causes of death—heart disease, cancer, stroke—among Black Americans; it isn’t just that lung cancer, caused mainly by smoking, is the form of cancer that kills most Black Americans; it isn’t just that Black smokers suffer higher rates of death from causes related to smoking. It’s worse than that. More

Americans want to be loved, yet are feared almost everywhere in the world. Americans see themselves as just and righteous, yet daily countenance harrowing transgressions of international law and basic human rights. We believe ourselves to be agents of freedom, yet most of us refuse to reflect on the ethical consequences of our imperial aggressions. We prefer not to know what is done in our name, not to see the mounds of corpses that litter the distant rims of the world from American missile and drone strikes. We don’t want to know, because such an inquiry threatens the essential tenets of our self-identity, undermines the comforting fabric of our beliefs, shatters the spectral illusion of our national psyche. More