Kicking off:
The rest of your reads:
- How the U.S. Military Shaped American Soccer.
- Why College Rape Victims Don’t Go to the Police.
- Intimate Uganda.
- A Short History of the Executioner.
- From Pussy Riot to Snowden: The Dissident Fetish.
- The Racism Beat:
Imagine an editor asking a writer to passionately articulate why a drunk driver hitting and killing a boy on a bicycle is wrong and sad. That would never happen, because a drunk driver killing a boy on a bike is a self-evident tragedy. Asking a writer to exert lots of effort to explain why would be a disservice to the dead, as if his right to life were ever in question, as if our moral obligation to not snuff out our fellow citizens via recklessness were something in need of an eloquent plea.
When another unarmed black teenager is gunned down, there is something that hurts about having to put fingers to keyboard in an attempt to illuminate why another black life taken is a catastrophe, even if that murdered person had a criminal record or a history of smoking marijuana, even if that murdered person wasn’t a millionaire or college student. There is something that hurts when thinking about the possibility of being “accidentally” shot on some darkened corner, leaving a writer who never met you the task of asking the world to acknowledge your value posthumously, as it didn’t during your life.
- Pink Collar, on the labor of PR.
- Weird Corporate Twitter.
- The Secret Lives of Lost Shipping Containers.
- High Stakes Criticism: The Stakes for Academic Gossip.
- Boy 2 Man, a review of Boyhood.
- Turning 14 in Cincinnati.
- The Student Debt Crisis Needs a Radical Reaction:
While struggling borrowers certainly stymie economic growth, it remains the case that student borrowers are a boon for the federal government. Fiddles and small fixes, like those of the latest executive order, serve to maintain, not end, a society of debtors.
Student debt is a bubble with no promise of burst. Most student loan debt is government backed and can never be discharged. So, as New Inquiry editor Malcolm Harris has rightly pointed out: “There’s no escape from student debt, and the government and markets both know it. This is, then, the real plan for the education bubble: student debtors will be forced, in one way or another, to fill it in. Not only are student loans not a burden on the federal government, they’re a good investment.”
Of course the Treasury and investors want to foster a generation of workers and consumers. But when there’s a debt bubble that structurally cannot burst, the government will not join any aggressive fight to remove the student debt burden. In the service of campaign politics, there will be policy tweaks, earnest speeches, and high words about freeing the debt-encumbered youth. But the student debt crisis will not end and that’s no big problem for the government. Demands for free education are DOA in the face of these realities.
Scott Ross 