- Late capitalism

- Nope, just “late capitalism”

Originally published at oxalic. You can comment here or there.

“The boy was dying. There was no treatment; he had lost too much blood, and his lungs had filled with concrete particles. Nott held his hand for four agonizing minutes. “All you can do is just comfort them,” he told me. I asked him what that entailed, since M1 had exhausted its supply of morphine. He began to cry, and said, “All you can hope is ( Read more... )

[I]t is not possible to be outraged about every single rights violation; the advocate needs to choose. And that choice often reflects an effort to craft a narrative that will gain attention.

[H]uman rights organizations turned their agendas into the philanthropic version of a Jurassic Park sequel: bigger, louder, more teeth. They consolidated as a ( Read more... )

Still waiting for more than $2,000 in unpaid invoices. God, this job.

Originally published at oxalic. You can comment here or there.

“For Huang, spiritual hunger was directly linked to intellectual control, and filling one meant breaking out of the other.”

“Then the Cultural Revolution destroyed tradition. What we have now is authority but no questions, because people don’t remember how to ask them.”

“Politicians made up the idea that Shadian is a terrorist place so they could ( Read more... )

I have a source listed in my phonebook as “Only person in the Water Sewerage Board who picks up the phone.”

Originally published at oxalic. You can comment here or there.

DO NOT TAKE ON ANY MORE REPORTING PROJECTS.

Submit stories in the long, interminable queue and stop wasting time.

Originally published at oxalic. You can comment here or there.

“It’s also interesting how, in New York, the increasingly small-scale industrial production of goods is value-laden as authentic and rustic. A cast-iron manhole cover from India is not imbued with the same sentimentality or rugged glamor as an iron bottle opener cast in, say Greenpoint, Brooklyn. As part of my preproduction research and preparation ( Read more... )

“Young people are uncomfortable with the unstructured world of work. No wonder so many elite students go into industries with clear boundaries, like finance and consulting.

If they’re forced into a challenge they don’t feel prepared for, they may even engage in what psychologists call “self-handicapping”: deliberately doing things that will hamper ( Read more... )

“In an era when people still believed in their own lives, they wrote autobiographies. We, by contrast, have become auto-obituarists. Despite all the work that social media users do to document themselves from one day to the next, what is recorded is not life. Rather it is death-in-life: it is “existence” from which life has already fled, leaving ( Read more... )