Ruth Wilson Gilmore: A popular notion in some progressive circles holds that US prisons are a chain of sweatshops and plantations where hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people labor under excruciating conditions to generate profits for transnational companies. Can you shed light on this view? James Kilgore: We need to re-think this notion. While such […]
At The Pain Clinic, North Alabama
I’m in Boaz, Sand Mountain, with a friend going to the local pain clinic. The waiting room is filled with middle-aged, rural/small-town, working-class whites who generally look in poor health. A crowded waiting room full of oxygen tanks and people who are either too obese or too thin, with few falling in-between. An extra-wide chair […]
UPDATE ON THE 2019 CRICKET WORLD CUP (as of June 15, 2019)
You won’t see anything about this in the NY Times, so I am taking responsibility for giving you yesterday’s news today or is it tomorrow’s news yesterday. This is all about the Cricket World Cup, currently being played throughout England and Wales. South Africa finally won a match today. They beat Afghanistan. So they are […]
The Black and White of It
One of my neighbors living three buildings down had his leg amputated several months ago. At first, the doctors thought it was a Brown Recluse spider bite but later figured out it was a circulation problem. Much of the lower leg turned black before the VA amputated it in Birmingham. I kept wondering when they […]
The Immortal Ten and the Rescue of John Doy
https://jeffersonjayhawkers.com/about/ In July 1859 Kansan James B. Abbott collected a force of 10 men to sweep into Missouri and spring Underground Railroad operator John Doy from jail. An early Lawrence, Kansas Territory, settler and dedicated abolitionist, Doy had been convicted of going into Missouri and luring a slave from bondage to seek freedom in the […]
Shame, Capitalism and Gay Psychology
Seven years ago, I met with my first gay-specialized psychologist. I was on a path of self-destruction I no longer wanted to be on, and thought this person could help. I had already been radicalized for a few years; I was decidedly “not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you” but I […]