Like just about everyone I know, Wednesday started with a bad mood. In the interests of actually sleeping Tuesday night, we decided to block all incoming news, distract ourselves, and pull up the covers early. When I woke up, I imagined the delight I would feel when I saw the headlines proclaiming Kamala Harris President. …
This is the first of two essays I am writing about a new book that I love (yes, love!): We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. This one derives a lesson strongly related to the upcoming election from Musa al-Gharbi’s sweeping analysis of “symbolic capitalists.” My dream is that some …
I have been thinking a lot about people who are deciding that not voting in the upcoming presidential election—or voting for a spoiler party with no chance of winning—is the only righteous thing to do in November. I have been searching for some way to express my hope that they will awaken from that belief …
I’m recuperating from arthroscopic knee surgery I had earlier this week. Not sure if it’s the pain or the drugs that are giving me a somewhat distanced perspective on our national shitshow of a presidential campaign, but suddenly the whole thing has the aspect of a miniature landscape viewed from a great height. As nearly …
NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 33rd episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 20 October 2023. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net’s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie …
“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” Bob Dylan “The law of unintended consequences is never broken.” I thought I would find many citations when I googled this, but since I found none, I’ll attribute it to myself. Quite a few people I know have been expressing …
I’m suspicious of nostalgia, even though I’m not immune to it. A glancing reference to the Sixties and I’m off on a magic carpet ride of reminiscence. Despite all of our youthful excesses and errors, I’m as imprinted with that era as a baby duck is with its mama. The flavor of nostalgia that especially …
If I hear one more person (however grudgingly) admire the Republicans’ “long game” and compliment them on masterminding a fifty-year strategy to overturn a longstanding consensus on rights, bodily autonomy, guns and more, I’ll scream. In fact, I’ve screamed already. It’s not that the U.S. Right doesn’t long for a Big Daddy and eagerly follow …
This is the text of a talk I gave on 8 April 2022 at the Community Built Association conference held at the Kaneko Foundation in Omaha, NE. I began by telling the assembled community-based artists and designers that I’d found it easier to react than to think during the last two years. My aim in …
Since the start of the pandemic, calls for new public-service job programs have been thick on the ground. A lot of smart people felt it was a no-brainer to call government in to employ folks who were out of work, paying them to do things for the public good. If you google “new WPA,” you’ll …