Livia Gershon

Compare and contrast
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Yet another thing about the American meritocratic elite. People raised from infancy to value professional success above everything else simply don't have the temperament to risk anything no matter how much is at stake.

Los Angeles’s War on Tramps - JSTOR Daily In the 1880s, Los Angeles began a large-scale project of incarcerating unemployed men whom they viewed as a threat to the vigor of white America.

Men who worked in agriculture and forestry often retreated to the cities and towns of sunny southern California for the winter. Some joked that, during the offseason, they invested their summer earnings in “houses and lots”—houses of prostitution and lots of whiskey.
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And tons of those groups were there recruiting people for things like local ICE rapid reponse networks!

Also, if previously apolitical people are getting involved in protests, of course they have radical positions. A lot of people thinking about politics for the first time are like “free healthcare for everyone, jail all homeless people, make people get a permit to have kids, and kill every CEO.”

I’m so confused by the wine moms discourse. It feels like people think that no one older than them can have radical politics. Like teenagers who can’t imagine their parents knowing about sex.

C’mon
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I mean
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I don’t know if I buy the idea that the left or the Democrats need a special strategy to reach young men. But if I did, I would be thinking about how facing down bullies to protect other people is the kind of thing Charlie Kirk or Jordan Peterson would tell you is masculine and cool.

The Art of Deforestation - JSTOR Daily Landscape paintings show how quickly American forests changed in the early nineteenth century—and the mixed feelings people had about that change.

When European colonists first arrived, 90% of New England was forested. By 1850, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were all down to around 30%
daily.jstor.org/the-art-of-d...

One of the more incredible stories out of LA this year has been how a taco review blog became the best on-the-ground coverage of ICE raids in the city.

They do a dispatch every day, follow-up on the kidnapped people (which almost no media outlet has done), and fact-check government claims.

Could be. I wonder how much connection there is between Hindu nationalists and the white-run US schools of yoga

Should Yoga Be More Than Exercise? - JSTOR Daily How should Westerners studying modern postural yoga think about the religious and medical systems in which it developed?

Many American yoga instructors still refer to aspects of the ancient Indian spiritual-medical system, something that seems potentially at odds with most practitioners’ understanding of modern science.
daily.jstor.org/should-yoga-...

Graffiti in pen: "asking for help gets you more abused" crossed out, "not true" also crossed out, "abusers never stop" underlined. Arrow pointing to the original message with the words "depends on the different situations"

The women's room graffiti at the district court, coming in with more nuance than most media coverage of violence and abuse

Waste Pickers Unite! - JSTOR Daily As one family’s story reveals, labor organizing and the development of a co-op for waste collection has improved conditions for precariously employed workers in India.

Pagabai's union card was her first state-recognized identification. It allowed her to enter the university through the main gate rather than sneaking in to pick trash and eventually got her an official contract with the institution.
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This part. Klein, like all of us, needs to figure out what his role is in the fight against fascism and then focus on that

blast from the past, but this "capitalism as AI" piece I wrote a few years back has been getting a second life for pretty obvious reasons

The Politics of Our AI Overlords - JSTOR Daily Fears of AI often focus on domination by algorithm-powered capitalism, but science fiction once used societies ruled by computers as analogs for communism.

In one Star Trek ep, a god-computer keeps a society in idyllic conditions. Kirk destroys it, telling the locals that they’ll come to enjoy “what we call freedom.” The moral, per @gerrycanavan.bsky.social: communism “might make you happy, but it won’t make you good.”
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weird behavior TikTok video by Peyton Vanest

This is the abolitionist messaging we need www.tiktok.com/t/ZTMLtrGwt/

“the melodious strains of the instrument never failed to arouse the enthusiasm of the homesick, whilst the tricks of the monkey served to amuse the leisure of the rough miners who were incapable of entering into the feelings inspired by his music.”
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Defining “White Trash” - JSTOR Daily The term “white trash” once was used to disparage poor white people. In the Civil Rights era, its meaning shifted to support business-friendly racial politics.

New South moderates still viewed segregation as crucial for cultivating the rising middle-class white communities of cities like Atlanta and Charlotte. They just wanted to achieve it without offending northern industry. Scapegoating poor whites helped.
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Islamic Calligraphy in West Africa - JSTOR Daily The Hausa people of northern Nigeria have adapted—and continue to transform—sacred Islamic calligraphy that originated in the Arab world.

Calligraphy, a respected part of Islamic scholarship in Nigeria's Hausa communities, requires education in various scripts, color theory, and methods of producing certain inks from ingredients including charcoal, millet, and the bark of certain trees.
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make a band singular:

Them (singular)

This also counts as political violence.

fucking wild that a partisan program of, say, deploying state security to purge the nation of immigrants or legislate trans people to premature death can be pretensed as a contribution to salutary democratic debate and not as something that might cause us to reflect on the term “political violence”

From Neoliberalism to Trumpism - JSTOR Daily The neoliberal politics that developed in the 1970s created financial instability and fragmented cultural markets, helping to pave the way for Trumpism.

Where Nazis used “the Jew” to represent the powers driving industrialization, @lebow.bsky.social argues, “the ‘illegal immigrant,’ who lacks human rights yet personifies the threat of globalized capitalism, is today’s indispensable outgroup.”
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Demonizing Immigrants in the 1880s - JSTOR Daily American newspapers portrayed members of immigrant groups as potential anarchists, linking the ideology to other anxieties and stereotypes about foreigners.

Most newspapers positioned themselves as allies of working Americans. But some argued that the system would naturally work for them as long as they worked hard and conducted themselves in correct, patriotic fashion.
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What Did the COVID Pandemic Do to Our Minds? - JSTOR Daily The pandemic’s transformation of daily lives around the world led to a loss of the bodily feeling of social trust across entire communities at once.

Lopes writes that trust isn’t a matter of believing intellectually in the honesty or goodwill of another individual or institution. It's a “peculiar type of background existential feeling” that structures our thoughts and actions even if we rarely think about it.
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Hamilton’s Real Immigration Story - JSTOR Daily The popular musical poses Alexander Hamilton as a symbol of the value of immigrants brought to America, but over time, his party became increasingly xenophobic.

In the first years of the 1800s, Hamilton wrote that, while immigration had benefited the nation in earlier decades, there were now enough Americans
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