“Each of us, I suspect, cherishes a particular landscape that outwardly reflects some all-too-invisible condition within. Its very topography gives colour, contour, dimension to otherwise inaccessible areas of inner reality. Endows them with palpable configuration.”
— Gustaf Sobin, from Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (University of California Press, 1999)
We expect humans to live on Mars in the near future, yet we haven’t even dared to inhabit Antarctica
Millennials are the only generation to have to teach both their parents and children not to believe everything they read online
Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, French & Kiswahili.
If you could instantly be granted fluency in 5 languages—not taking away your existing language proficiency in any way, solely a gain—what 5 would you choose?
The concept of assemblage—an open-ended entanglement of ways of being—is more useful. In an assemblage, varied trajectories gain a hold on each other, but indeterminacy matters. To learn about an assemblage, one unravels its knots.
The Mushroom at the End of the World - Anna Tsing
this is insane and wildly unconstitutional and prisons are really really really evil
Lesbian Construction Workers Protesting for Jobs, unknown date
The economies of the US, Canada, and the European Union depend on immigrant labor. As Harsha Walia documents, the purpose of the border regime is not to stop immigration but to control and terrorize it. When Germany decided in 2015 to take in over a million refugees from the Syrian civil war, it was only because the largest association of German employers had just declared that the national economy faced a shortfall of millions of skilled laborers. But at no point did the German government allow direct flights from Turkey or Lebanon, where so many of the refugees were warehoused. Instead, they obligated refugees to make the expensive and perilous journey over the Aegean Sea, through the Balkans, under and over razor wire fences, through police truncheons and tear gas, past violent, xenophobic crowds, so that finally they would arrive with almost nothing, willing to accept any labor conditions and bureaucratic controls. It was a journey that cost on average several thousand euros, on top of the steep psychological price, effectively ensuring that primarily only members of the university-educated middle class would be able to make it.
Peter Gelderloos, The Solutions are Already Here
untitled by irana on Flickr.