Tag: empire
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Everything’s Been Recruited
Caryl Churchill is without a doubt one of the greatest living playwrights. Anyone who says otherwise is a cultural chauvinist. And there are plenty of those types out there, some with massive platforms. People who genuinely believe that her radical formal experiments – sometimes Brechtian, sometimes Jacobean, very often pointedly surreal – are a degeneracy,…
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What If We Kissed Beneath the Crashing Spy Balloon?
We’ll have to hurry if we’re going to make it. If we leave now and push the speed limit, we can be at the South Carolina coast just as the flashing lights start to peek out of the clouds. We’ll dash down the damp beach and leap into the frigid waves, clothes and all, swimming…
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Time and Space, Music and Crisis
Nobody needs to be reminded that we find ourselves in a bit of a state, an impasse, a roadblock in front of our ability to imagine a future better than one of climate catastrophe, and the socialized sadism of far right. Positing that what is missing from our discussions of revolutionary strategy and vision is…
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The Least Incompetent Empire
What does Vladimir Putin want? The question is the obsession of just about every reporter, pundit and politician in the west right now. Virtually none of their answers should be considered reliable. They are spun from the same stuff as the worst Cold War paranoia. And make no mistake, the invasion of Ukraine is the…
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No Catharsis
Entering Donald Trump’s world felt like entering into a bad fiction. For me the feeling was amplified given that news of the elections reached me, in real time, high above the planet’s surface. Months before the 2016 elections I had booked a flight from Chicago (where I lived at the time) to London (where I…
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Twenty-Five Things You Can Call a Concentration Camp Other Than “Concentration Camp”
Pity the middling white ego. Noticing nothing but oppression as far as the eye can see. Having its drive back from the Hamptons interrupted by marching Black people, hearing people speak Spanish at the grocery store, encountering homeless people in broad daylight who refuse to decrease the surplus population. Oppression is positively everywhere for this poor, disgruntled…
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Here In the Empire
Poway, California. The final day of Passover. According to one eight-year-old child in attendance, the shooter aimed for the kids first. The rabbi was shot through the hand, losing his index finger, and reports say that at first he attempted to continue speaking from the front. A member of the congregation, sixty-year-old Lori Gilbert Kaye,…