Tag: labor

  • Fire in the Gap

    Fire in the Gap

    I cannot remember what happened. It is a hole, a blank spot, an infinitesimal chasm in what was my mind. The moments leading up are hazy, as if I saw them through layers of gauze.

  • All We Want is More Time

    All We Want is More Time

    For the second time in less than a year, a major, headline-grabbing strike has been averted. Not with the employers giving in to the unions’ demands. No, that would be too sensical, too much of a break with the cruel absurdity of our moment.

  • Awful Fun

    Awful Fun

    Despite its carnivalesque reputation, what stands out more than anything in Las Vegas is just how repressed everyone is. Walk along the floor of a casino at 8am, and you see hundreds of people parked in front of slot machines, smoking cigarettes or drinking gin and tonics, the sums on their credit cards slowly but…

  • Kill the Means Test In Your Head

    Kill the Means Test In Your Head

    If the headlines are to be believed then a new relief bill is going to be passed any day now. Millions of people who have been tossed into poverty since the expiration of the CARES Act five goddamned months ago are going to finally be tossed a paltry lifeline. Whether it’s enough to lift them…

  • Remain Indoors

    Remain Indoors

    For the past month we’ve come to grips with this strange yet somehow familiar feeling: history happening without our permission. Of course that’s always been how it is. How many of us have ever truly felt we’ve had definitive control over events? Damn few of us, that’s who. But still, in our schedules, our social…

  • Synthpop, the Left, and the Future That Refuses to Come

    Synthpop, the Left, and the Future That Refuses to Come

    Depeche Mode have long suffered in the synthpop scene from what I call “godfather syndrome.” They aren’t the only act of massive influence who find themselves in such a position. Nor is it entirely, or even mostly, their fault. The irony of popular culture’s nostalgic time-loop is that it never really lets you see even…