A review of John Carlos Frey, Sand and Blood: America’s Stealth War on the Mexico Border, New York: Bold Type Books, 2019, 243 pages. John Carlos Frey’s Sand and Blood relates the roughly 140-year history of U.S. anti-immigrant racism and policy on the southwest border, and highlights its mostly pre-Trump, bipartisan intensification over the last […]
Archives for 2019
After El Paso and Dayton
1. praise for the first responders; 2. exhortations from local political leaders that “this will not affect who we are” and “we will recover”; 3. a promise of thorough investigation; 4. detailed speculation about what charges the shooter might face (if he’s still alive); 5. a commitment to notify victims’ families as soon as possible; […]
Life in America
The following is from the affidavit appealing for a reduced sentence submitted by the lawyers for Cesar Sayoc, the man accused of sending fake pipe bombs to dozens of top Democrats at the time of the 2018 elections. See editors’ comment at end. Federal Defenders of New York, Inc. Southern District The Honorable Jed S. […]
The Moral Economy in the Black Rural South
(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. […]