- The Worst Day of My Life is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction.
- Homes for the Homeless.
- The War on Women is Over – And Women Lost.
- Finding Solidarity in Disaster.
- Why Wages Aren’t Rising.
- Parenting for a Different Future in the Congo.
- How Cooper Union Screwed Its Students and Betrayed Its Legacy:
Giving education away for free is easy, especially if you’ve been doing it for 150-plus years: you just accept students and then start teaching them. But charging tuition is expensive because it requires a huge bureaucracy, all of which Cooper needed to build from scratch. And so, in order to be able to charge tuition, Cooper Union had to borrow evenmore money, partly just to build up that bureaucracy. In August 2014, it borrowed another $50 million. The debts were piling up, while the revenues were still nowhere to be seen.
- The Corn Wars, on China’s effort to catch up to the US.
- Taylor Swift is Dreaming of a Very White Africa.
- Scents of an Ending, on the You Stink protests in Lebanon.
- The MOOC Revolution That Wasn’t.
- Desperate Crossing, photos from the refugee journey.
- Refuge as Protection:
There is a global refugee crisis–today, it is on Europe’s shores; two months ago, it was on Malaysia’s; one year ago, it was on the southern border of the United States. This is a crisis of no specific moment: it is persistent, because the violence whence it came is persistent. The refugees that violence creates occupy a worldly purgatory. In camps, the ramshackle residence that becomes their home is impermanent by definition, and their new society is governed at once by the formal legal codes of domestic and international humanitarian governance, and an informal assortment of evolutionary bodies. Even when these refugees are resettled–given permanent visas, permanent homes–the societies that host them place them at their margins.
- Men Consume; Women Are Consumed: 15 Thoughts on the Stigma of Sex Work.
- An Assemblic Ethnography of the Drug War.
- Gaza is Becoming Uninhabitable.
- How It Feels When White People Shame Your Culture’s Food – And Then Make It Trendy.
- They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist, on being an writer of color:
[W]hat Hudson is doing [by using a Chinese pseudonym] isn’t anything that white male writers haven’t already been doing since the first recorded instance of our culture embracing any kind of excellence that did not include them: scramble to come up with ways to keep the playing field uneven, to keep the odds stacked in their favor. The scandal of Hudson performing the laziest act of yellowface (co-opting a Chinese name) to get his poem published and accepted into the Best American Poetry anthology is lurid fodder for our cultural conversation because of its explicitness, but it should not be strange or unbelievable. White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it. After all, 50 years ago, when black voices were fighting to be heard, when their stories of trauma and abuse were struggling for legitimacy, it took John Howard Griffin, a white man who dyed his skin black and wrote about his experiences as a “black” man in his book, Black Like Me, for white Americans to believe that yes, black people were telling the truth about their lived experiences in the Jim Crow South. He was hailed a singular hero. Studs Terkel once said, “Griffin was one of the most remarkable people I have ever encountered. He was just one of those guys that comes along once or twice in a century and lifts the hearts of the rest of us.” It may seem totally nuts now, but as far as who gets credit for simply being affected by black pain, it doesn’t seem very removed from our current world where we heap lavish praise on someone like Jon Stewart for announcing on the Daily Show that he was too heartbroken to make jokes after the Charleston church shooting, as if all throughout this country’s present and past, black people and people of color have not been so heartbroken and so violated that we were left humorless, or worse, dead. To praise Stewart as excessively as he was praised is to say to black people: Your pain is unexceptional and does not matter until a white man feels it too.
Scott Ross 