“First day back in the classroom in a year! Wish me luck!😬” “Have a great and safe semester everyone!” “Can’t believe it’s been over a year.” I’m looking around at teacher friends, peers, colleagues, acquaintances as the new school year is beginning, and it seems like there’s a hesitant joy…

Writing is an act of learning. There are things I want to learn more about, and things I have to learn more about. These essays (literally, efforts) are processes of learning, and in the realm of sex, gender, and social construction there is an infinite evolving array of things I…

Why is our schedule more important than our lives? It’s late June, and there’s still a pandemic. I’m watching lots of academic institutions unfurl their plans for the Fall semester, with lots of pomp and pride and gravitas in these president’s or provost’s letters, talking about how many committees conferred and how carefully next year’s plans have been thought through. Hybrid, in-person, socially-distanced, remote learning in all…

Let us never forget 9/11 — and how the terrorist attacks provided the political cover for the largest seizure of civil liberties in the US since Asian-Americans were mass-interred during World War 2, and how the PATRIOT Act still enables intrusions into our digital privacy that were once the stuff…

Our Irrational Faith in Money is the Only True Barrier to Saving Ourselves A global pandemic is raging. Medical care is scarce. Unemployment is off the charts. Food and housing are uncertain for millions. What, again, is the current justification for the existence of money? The lack of it stands between us and feeding everyone, caring for everyone, keeping everyone housed and secure…

Revolution by Unemployment History books create an image of revolution that involves masses in the streets, banners and barricades. They also tend to proclaim the march of history as punctuated by these upheavals, implying that societies only change in sudden surges. Disappointed radicals may bemoan the absence of revolutions like this, because they’ve…

And Other Things We Can’t Clearly See Because Our Government is Built to Make Us Afraid — There’s a problem with current calls by Democrats, the left, and seemingly rational people all around the world to label the mass shootings and other acts of violence perpetrated seemingly weekly by white supremacist men as terrorism — and that is the malleability of the idea of terrorism itself. The…

AND HOW HAS IT BEEN ALLOWED TO EAT ART? — I’ve learned some interesting things during my recent job search. If you are a filmmaker looking for a job in the nation’s largest city, you’ll find on an average about 5 job listings a month for ‘filmmaker’ at your typical job-posting website. 3 of those will be misspelled searches for people who know how to use ‘Filemaker,’ a piece of…

Art’s Complicity in Authoritarianism Notes on Artists’ Literacies, Part 2 In Part 1, I described how a public ‘illiteracy’ in the disjunctive synthesis of collage allowed authoritarian atrocity to occur in plain sight. While artists might recognize what’s going on, thanks to their training or their cultivated instinct in ‘collage logic,’ there’s a secondary question of equal importance: what are we doing about it?