Things that make you go Hmmmm

Anxiety about the “meaning” of citizenship and anxiety about who belongs in America, in other words, more than share a border (pun intended?) with anxieties about low birth rates. Because the vision for raising the American birth rate is also not about creating a nation with stronger ties. Rather, it’s about forcing women back into roles that they ... See more

Imagining communities isn’t simply about who can be in the community, but also about who in the community can participate in imagining the community. This is why the move to undo birthright citizenship, which not-so-subtly targets people of color, must also be understood alongside the move to restrict reproductive access and repeal no-fault divorce... See more

I find myself slowing changing from an agent of change to an agent of care. I’m less confident in the impact my activism might have on policy than I am about the impact my care may have on other human beings, as well as how they might trickle up to the systems that need changing.

What I've seen work in real life are activities such as mutual aid, c... See more

I’m happy for just 1% of us, or three million Americans to watch the news all day and dedicate their time and energy to devising global solutions together, while the other 335 million of us stand ready to vote or march or do whatever will help them enact the policy they’re working towards. That distribution of labor frees up a lot of time and energ... See more

Many of us are confused, finding ourselves fighting for the very globalist institutions — World Bank, International Monetary Fund, European Union and trade zone — we had been protesting against ten years earlier. Last week, I wrote about the way the institutions we may have once thought were promoting Enlightenment values or developing the world’s ... See more

I’ve spent most of life and career thinking of myself as an agent of change. I grew up at the end of the Vietnam War protests, and mixed one part Brechtian activist theater to another part prophetic Judaism and ended up at the TWO protests and Occupy Wall Street. I really believed we could use those deliberate mechanisms to create policy, fight the... See more

Anything like true social justice, mutual aid, or “team human” as I’ve come to call it, happens in that mycelial, connected, doula space where compassion resides and domination has no place: there are no subjects and objects, just relationships.

The boat navigating across the ocean may need those coordinates, but the surfer or even the tiny fishing vessel may care more about the waves. Mapmakers can’t see those movements; the waves do not exist. But that’s where the action is.

Connective tissue wasn’t even acknowledged, much less treated as an organ, by Western medicine until the last few years. They didn’t even acknowledge its existence, or the meridians, gut biome, or any of the other liminal, in-between things that actually compose the community of organisms our bodies represent and share.

The organs are just the figu... See more