Old Future New York

“If, like Donald Trump, you were 44 in 1990, crime had risen in every decade of your life… If you really want to get an idea of what this era felt like, watch a bunch of ’80s and ’90s science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies. No, really.”

Read it at MTV News

Superpredators and Scapegoats

“It is fair to be angry at the Clintons for their actions, but if we attempt to make them our sacrificial scapegoats, we run the risk of underplaying how deeply the roots of mass incarceration run, and how hard we will have to work to rip them out.”

Read it at MTV News

Life During Wartime

“This is why the cross is such a powerful mystery in Christianity, because for Christians it is the only time an execution was transformed into a symbol of life. It is not for us to do.”

Read it at MTV News

The Meme of the Year

“The image of Clinton as someone who always knew what she was doing is part of what made the idea that she was exceptionally shady or corrupt so difficult to shake.”

Read it at MTV News

Liberal Fan Fiction

“The problem comes, as with any other metaphor, when you return to it so often that you start projecting the characteristics of the metaphor back onto reality.” 

Read it at MTV News

Black Flag

“Kendrick is able to write himself into the American flag for the same reason Kaepernick can write himself out of it — the American flag is a political object and its meaning is malleable and contestable.”

Read it at MTV News

What Makes A Person Vote for Donald Trump?

“The alienation of the people who have turned to Trump points to a deeper, broader problem in American society. And if we ignore it, we will regret it.”

Read it at MTV News

Slow Poison

“The fullness of racism’s cruel bounty is not found in the bodies of the dead alone, but also in the spirits of the living.”

Read it at Pacific Standard

 

White Fight, White Flight: The Atlanta Hawks and the Race Card

“A particularly irreverent historian might summarize the story of Atlanta as ‘white fight, then white flight’.”

Read it at Vice Sports

The Parable of the Unjust Judge or: Fear of a Nigger Nation

“You will never leave a body pure enough to not be judged complicit in its own destruction.”

Read it at The Toast