We often discover new media fascinations in roundabout ways. In February of 2022, when filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki emailed me to ask if I’d seen Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s “Forensickness” (2022), I had only the vaguest sense of what had come to be called the “video essay.” I...
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Complicity and Resistance in a Time of Genocidal Agony
What to Do? I am writing especially thinking about Palestinian women. They have suffered so immeasurably and grotesquely while they have tried to care for their children and their pregnancies, while being malnourished, dehydrated, starved, and heartbroken while death...
The Heritage of Language: Antisemitism and Islamophobia are Western Words
As the world watches the dystopian horror movie in Gaza unfolding on social and traditional media, U.S. news networks are giving more attention this week to the Hollywood awards season. As South Africa makes the case against Israel’s genocide at the International...
From My Body to Yours, and Gaza to the World
A Meditation on Death, Killing, and Possibility I knew my body was healing from the surgery when I found myself ready to engage with the world and posted on Facebook: I am always anti-zionist. And never an antisemite. And always an anti-racist feminist against...
Why Republican Lawmakers Should Ban “The Federalist Papers” from America’s Classrooms
As everyone now knows, since 2021, Republican legislators in several dozen states have banned or attempted to ban consideration of so-called “divisive concepts” regarding race and gender within public university classrooms. Foes of what Pen America rightly labels...
On the Tragic Inevitability of Stacking Corpses
War. Genocide. Pandemics. Heat. Famine. Racism. Misogyny. Hunger. Violence. There are so many ways for mortal beings to die, especially the most vulnerable, and too often these deaths are state sponsored, sped by capitalism, and/or preventable. We — humans and...
“Barbie”: An Anti-Racist Socialist Feminist Meditation
I started writing this the day “Barbie” was opening in the theatres. I had not seen it yet, because I am writing less about the film and more about the cultural and political moment we inhabit as it opens. I went as soon as I finished an early draft, exactly one week...
Supreme Court Ruling in Stalking Case Hurts Victims
Stalking is a social and public health emergency. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Counterman v. Colorado makes things easier for abusers and harder for victims. A form of gender-based violence, stalking affects more than 13 million people annually in the...
The Rogue Court’s Reactionary Radicalism
This Is a Catastrophe. I am finishing the writing of this piece shortly after the July 4 holiday. This is significant — to wonder who this country is now, and before. I began writing it while riding the bus into NYC from Ithaca, NY, on Friday, June 30, while the last...
Bipolar Ecocinema: Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s “Matter Out Of Place” and Michael Gitlin’s “The Night Visitors”
These days, most of us are torn between eco-terror of the future and a persistent hope that what seems inevitable can somehow be redirected (earlier eras have often seen the world coming to an end). It’s hardly surprising that inventive filmmakers are finding new ways...