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October 21, 2020
“Different Experiences with the Data” | DC’s Covid Math
Allison Hrabar
I thought learning about DC’s Covid-19 response would help me regain the sense of control I lost in March. I’d been inside for three months, court closures had made my day job as a paralegal largely irrelevant, and DC’s Covid-19 dashboard updated daily around 10:30 AM. I started waiting in bed every morning until the latest infections and deaths were posted, in some version of the strategy people use to...
October 21, 2020
A Note from the Fireline | Climate Change and the Colonial Legacy of Fire Suppression
Jordan Thomas
In late August, before dawn broke on a foggy California morning, I marched with a crew of wildland firefighters through a redwood forest. We crossed a small farm, the jostle of our footsteps joining the cries of sheep and chickens as a man and woman paused to watch us pass. A mile in, we found the Dolan Fire creeping close to the ground through the underbrush, as if lying in...
October 21, 2020
“Stratified and Fragmented” | Teaching and Learning in a Pandemic
Andrew DiPrinzio, Bix Archer, Bryan Bejarano, Chet Ozmun, Dylan Hardenbergh, Emily Tian, George Duoblys, James McAsh, John Tormey, Julia Martins, Juliette Bretan, Kiva Uhuru, Lucas Cassoli, Mia Wood, Shoaib Shafi, Tryggvi Brynjarsson
From day care to graduate school, teaching and learning have been upended as never before. Schools closed in March, teaching was relegated to Zoom, and parents became reluctant homeschoolers. While the wealthy assembled pods to avoid the risks of ordinary in-person schooling, the poor juggled full time childcare with essential work. Now, we’re seeing a patchwork of half-measures and ill-advised, staggered reopenings as another year begins — and rising rates...
October 21, 2020
The DJ and the Miracle Cure | The Perils of Postcolonial Medicine in Madagascar
Chanelle Adams
On March 16, Madagascar’s state-owned TV station aired an 18-minute documentary. Narrated by two airline pilots, it re-enacts a November 2019 visit to the island nation by an anonymous Brazilian woman purported to be a prophet. “Joana,” as she is dubbed in the film, crosses the island in two flights, one south-to-north and the other east-to-west, tracing the shape of a crucifix. She has been sent by God, she confides...
October 21, 2020
Art after Objecthood | Self-Consciousness from the Minimalists to the Present
Lucas Zwirner
In 1967, a budding art critic and PhD student named Michael Fried published the essay in Artforum that would make him famous. “Art and Objecthood” was on the surface a piece that took aim at the Minimalists, then a group of up-and-coming artists led by Donald Judd. But embedded in the critique was a fully-fledged theory of art — in many ways the last of its kind. In the years since,...
October 21, 2020
Editors’ Note | A Feature, Not a Bug
1. Even Netflix thinks it’s time to log off. Last month, the streaming service released The Social Dilemma, a documentary that promised to “unveil the hidden machinations behind everyone’s favorite social media and search platforms.” Intercut between dramatizations featuring actors you’ll sort-of recognize (Pete Campbell from Mad Men, the guy who played Larry’s dermatologist’s son on the most recent season of Curb) are the direct-to-camera testimonies of former tech...
October 21, 2020
“Naming the Work” | An Interview with Silvia Federici
The Drift
Last month, the U.S. saw hundreds of thousands of women disappear from the workforce, part of a trend that has accelerated since the pandemic began. At the same time, we’re seeing a transformation of attitudes toward work and the organization of society around it, as the rupture of normalcy reveals deep-seated unsustainability. To guide us in thinking through this tumultuous time, we Zoomed with the legendary Marxist feminist scholar-activist Silvia...
October 21, 2020
Losing Count | The Sordid Business of Bookkeeping
Noah Kulwin
There is plenty of blame to go around for the stunning explosion of Wirecard. Until as recently as this year, the payments processing company was considered a German national treasure, the most exciting European technology firm since Nokia’s mid-2000s heyday. Valued in August 2018 at a peak of more than $28 billion, it looked like Wirecard and its executives were going to skate by on clout alone when a series of...
October 21, 2020
Bullets | Poetry
Kaleem Hawa
A list of things I learned from you: the coercion of form; formalism as anxiety; art’s fickleness as the point; dematerialization of thoughts as insects; iconicity as dehumanization rather than elevation; ambivalence as deeply uncool; (moral cloaking as the same); that I’m pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty...
October 21, 2020
Our Friend Angela | Soviet Schoolchildren, a Letter-Writing Campaign, and the Legend of Angela Davis
Yana Skorobogatov
Several years ago, I found myself sitting at a desk in the main reading room of Stanford University’s Hoover Library. The box in front of me contained thousands of unopened letters, their thin red, white, and blue envelopes stacked indiscriminately. All were postmarked in the winter of 1972, and written in languages of the former Soviet Union: Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Ukrainian, Kazakh. Most notably, all were addressed to Angela...