“Walk-on girls,” “Grid girls,” whatever you call them, they all serve the same functions: hype up the crowd, wear the sponsors’ logos, and most of all, look pretty. It’s a sports modeling job, plain and simple. You fill the entrance pit at the races or entertain the crowd between rounds of darts. Sexuality is absolutely…

Mardi Gras in New Orleans is known as a time of pure indulgence. Chasing down floats for beads, drinking until you puke, dancing your ass off, and flashing your tits are pretty much expected. So why, at a time when the rest of the community is partying in the streets, are there strippers marching through…

My father has been stealing for as long as I can remember. As a child I witnessed him simply walking out of bookstores, one hand clasped in mine and a pile of magazines and books in the other. Nobody ever stopped him and I never said a word. Years later, as an adult, I watched…

“I was home with my daughter, my service dog Pono, and Rosie the chinchilla, who belongs to my daughter, Abby. When I read the alarm, I jump out of bed and grab my glasses. I run to Abigail’s room. ‘Get up honey. You have to get up right now. Right now. Grab your pillow. Go…

Tuesday, as the world prepared to listen to the State of the Union, a small piece of news slunk out with horrifying implication. The Trump administration had withdrawn its pick for ambassador to South Korea, Victor Cha, after he privately expressed disagreement with a plan for a “limited strike” on North Korea. This piece of…

“Freedom” and “liberty” are the stodgy, dust-covered utterances of academics, fascist patriots, and manipulative dogmatists; or at least they can feel that way. But behind all that cultural baggage is something that reaches deep into our experience and hopes and pulls out a fistful of primal energy and connectivity. This feeling is so intrinsic to…

This past October marked the 120th anniversary of Brazil’s biggest state-sponsored massacre. The War of Canudos took place between 1896 and 1897 and took the lives of 35,000 people, including men, women, and children. Amidst the civilians killed, at least 500 indigenous Kiriri died. According to the anthropologist Edwin Reesink (with whom I spoke over…

The prisoners are revolting again, folks. After the wave of strikes launched on the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison riots and the August 19th strikes of this past year, inmates in Florida are planning another strike starting on January 15th, 2018 on Martin Luther King Day. On that day, in what has been dubbed…

The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson’s recent continuation of the Star Wars saga, has generated many new takes. Yet most focus on debates about aesthetics, storytelling, cinematography, fandom politics, and concerns with fantasy physics rather than the social and political commentary of the movie. Perhaps it’s because the main political messages of this installment were so…

Curating autobiographies, the Modernist movement, and the false promise of social media in the Trump era This essay was written during the days following the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. As a means of sorting through the benefits of social media in establishing a political stance in the Trump era, I found myself at an impasse….

San Gavino Monreale, in Sardinia, is my birth-town. It’s also the single biggest producer of the spice called saffron in Italy. We call it also red gold for its color and price. Saffron is a tradition that dates back centuries. The first bulbs (the spice is extracted from a flower) were cultivated around the XIII…

On October 24 a judge dismissed the charges levied against several protesters who burned the American flag at the Republican National Convention last year. The protesters weren’t technically charged with burning the flag because that might constitute a violation of free speech. The protesters were charged with one of the state’s many items in its…

If there’s one deep and profound disagreement with the left I have it’s a systematic privileging of collective stability or unity over individual free association. It’s a sad fact that leftist activists often hunger for community far more than they hunger for freedom. And one consequence of this is a persistent inability to deal with…

The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, better known as the Jones Act, is a classic example of a law that has remained on the books for decades, only attracting attention when it creates problems too big to ignore. This clearly happened this August, when it delayed shipments of aid to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria….

Recently, Vishal Wilde advocated for a universal basic income (UBI) on the grounds that it promotes economic freedom and social justice. Indeed, UBI has long been attractive to libertarians of various stripes. However, this idea suffers from the problem that, to date, UBI proposals have generally relied on the state for a taxation and distribution…

Skin as Thick as Bark As asinine, cultish leaders fascistically toy with the notion of nuclear warfare, we are reminded yet again of the fragility of human life. That humans have advanced as far as we have is remarkable. It reminds me of the feeling of awe I have when realizing that we limited humans…

Anarchists take a hard stand against the prison system and carceral, punitive, and statist punishments schemas. As a result, we seek alternatives and tend to veer towards community and survivor-led accountability processes with a generally restorative and transformative intention. Restorative justice (RJ) is an approach towards dealing with harm done that focuses on repairing the…

After antifa clashed with right-wing protesters in Berkeley, Mayor Jesse Arreguin argued that California “should classify [Antifa] as a gang.” Later this month, juggalos – fans of the rap group Insane Clown Posse (ICP) – will protest their own federal gang classification in Washington, DC. Gang classification is commonly misunderstood. ICP themselves were originally amused…

In-group Preference and National Borders Fundamental to the danger of nation-states and borders are the paradigms of nationalism and in-group preference that exploit human quirks to justify violence. In-group preference is best understood in terms of the creation of teams through the dehumanization of an ‘other.’ In-group preference is mentally categorizing someone who is somehow…

Since the Bernie Sanders campaign, there has been an uptick in interest in the ideas of democratic socialism among leftists. This has played a role in radicalizing both progressives and former democrats and refocusing the left on movements for labor rights and social justice. Seeing this as an opportune moment, many social anarchists have started…