My friend Nico saw this painting in a junk shop, and posted it. I thought, that looks like my other friend Eugene. And it is! Eugene made this self-portrait in 10th grade art class. And his mom threw it in the trash. Someone rescued it and ~15 years later it showed up in a store.
In the first days of protests in D.C., Arianna Evans was walking the frontlines with a megaphone, making other demonstrators back up and calm down. Now, this is how she feels:
washingtonpost.com/local/protest-…
I've spent the last decade writing the same sentence a million times over and over again, phrased differently. I'll try it once more:
Police professionalization is not designed to change how policing operates but is meant to change how everyone else perceives police legitimacy.
New study shows 43 of the 50 most populous cities in the US spend more on police, jails, courts, etc than on health & human svcs, public health, parks & rec, etc. This spending ratio is not correlated to public safety at all.
I've been working on a journal article for 4+ years; rewritten it top-to-bottom 4 times & left ~35,000 words on the cutting-room floor. Peer reviews drove me insane. I now hate every word of the final vers. On the bright side, it'll be behind a paywall & no one will ever read it.
The reason the US has such a difficult time understanding its current predicament is because all the terms that might apply—like “failed state”—were invented by the US for the purpose of blaming racial others for causing what was really the effect of the US-led capitalist system.
Walter Benjamin died avoiding capture by the Nazis 80 years ago today. Here is the sculpture memorializing him where he died, one of the most amazing sights I have ever seen.
Got to see the most incredible piece of art today: “Passages” by Dani Karavan, in Portbou, Catalunya, memorializing Walter Benjamin in the border town where his life ended in 1940. My photos can’t convey its power.
In 1970, the NY Times published a piece purporting to expose Jewish fears that anti-zionism was the new antisemitism within Black Power and New Left groups. The FBI took notice and turned the article into a pamphlet as part of its Counterintelligence Program or COINTELPRO. 1/13
People who have never ridden the subway will patrol it by order of the governor who has never ridden the subway to appease the upstate investor class who will never ride the subway so that Hochul has money to spend on losing the next election.
New: Gov. Hochul announces that she is deploying 750 National Guard members into the NYC subways to conduct bag checks, in addition to another 250 law enforcement members. She is also proposing a bill to ban people convicted of a violent crime on the subway from public transit