(Reprinted from the July-August 2019 “The Brooklyn Rail) Once you drive out of Huntsville, within 15 minutes you run into deeply rural areas. Open fields, some cultivated, some wild; mobile homes and modest bungalows mix with a growing number of new suburban houses; fortunately, not enough—yet—to change the social character of the area. The lanes […]
The black hole of my job
The event horizon of a black hole is the line beyond which all possible paths forward in time lead to the center of the black hole. It is the dividing line between regions of space where there are possible routes leading away from the black hole and regions of space where there are no possible […]
Growing old in “post-recession” America
Like so many other children of aging parents, I will at some point assume the responsibility of looking after my mom. Her Social Security benefits are insufficient for her to live on and she relies on assistance from my brother and me to scrape by. Thinking about my mom’s precarious position fills me with dread. […]
The Revolutionary Moment
What brings the revolutionary moment? I am not referring to the political struggle that takes place within every mass movement—unions or workers’ councils, soviets or provisional government, abolition or free-soil, black power or civil rights, etc.—but the moment when subordinated individuals whom no exhortation, not even free beer, can lure out of their homes become […]
Bookstore adventures
From 1992 to 1998 I worked at a large independent bookstore. Mostly I worked in the store room. They started me on paperback literature which was a mess. My task was to alphabetize and stack the books such that they could easily be found in the event of a request, or simply for re-stocking the […]
Some Reflections on Prison Labor
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 […]