@bostonreview.bsky.social
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Catching up on reading, this by @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social is excellent.
"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."
www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
“These lies are more than morally wrong; they are politically and structurally significant. Police mendacity acts as a critical accelerant for the carceral state, greasing the wheels by generating arrests, extracting revenue, justifying police violence, and shielding officers from accountability.”
04.10.2025 19:42 — 👍 10 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
“Much about what Ezra Klein argues is objectionable,”—including “the appeal to debate as ’persuasion,’ which confuses the mere appearance of giving and responding to reasons with the substance of good-faith rational inquiry,” writes columnist @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social.
03.10.2025 19:04 — 👍 105 🔁 20 💬 4 📌 4
“This rhetoric, like much of the writing throughout the book, isn’t just ‘simple’. It constantly verges on platitude or tautology, concealing consequential political, economic & moral judgments behind a veneer of common sense.”
www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
“I am no less committed to resisting, but without the belief that history is on my side. It’s a form of stubborn resistance that is the legacy of my father.” I cried several times reading this. Who you’re now is who you will be on the other side of this.
www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...
As ICE agents terrorize Chicago neighborhoods and rough up my friends, patients, neighbors, and elected officials with total impunity, this essay I wrote for Boston Review last week on the myths surrounding "political violence" is as pressing as ever.
www.bostonreview.net/articles/wha...
“With the mission of democratic education itself at stake, I expected resistance, even from those who were administering the neoliberal university as a corporate autocracy, treating knowledge production as a private commodity rather than a public good.”
Joan Wallach Scott on “what we got instead”:
The flip side of this exceptionalizing is to erase and excuse the slow and less spectacular violence of American political life. When ICE agents raid homes, when Medicaid is stripped from millions, both politicians and media speak of “policy” rather than “violence.” @eric-reinhart.com
03.10.2025 20:00 — 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 2
“Much about what Ezra Klein argues is objectionable,”—including “the appeal to debate as ’persuasion,’ which confuses the mere appearance of giving and responding to reasons with the substance of good-faith rational inquiry,” writes columnist @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social.
03.10.2025 19:04 — 👍 105 🔁 20 💬 4 📌 4“By cloaking naked power in the trappings of the law, the Trump administration, like the Bush administration before it, channels objections to its behavior into sterile disputes about who has the best lawyers—a dispute that no one really expects to resolve.”
03.10.2025 17:21 — 👍 12 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1
"Blouin’s very birth troubled a colonial order erected on a strict racial hierarchy. She would make sure that her life would be far more of a problem for it."
03.10.2025 15:39 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
In the Boston Review, Lily Hu discusses How to Lie with (Political) Statistics.
03.10.2025 14:37 — 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0we should bring back shame actually
www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
“I’ve come to think of the Democratic Party as being more of a professional association for liberals than a real political party. There’s not this sense of excruciating mission that the Republicans and the right have.”
Osita Nwanevu talks with @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social:
The liberal-heterodox alliance over “free speech” engineered by people like Bari Weiss is precisely what has eased the way for the most authoritarian, anti-free speech government the United States has seen since the McCarthy era, argues @pastpunditry.bsky.social:
02.10.2025 20:44 — 👍 58 🔁 25 💬 2 📌 0
“I learned early about the intrusive operations of state power in the daily routines of domestic life. For years, we all breathed a general air of anxiety.”
Historian and @aaup.org member Joan Wallach Scott on the Red Scare, then and now:
“No amount of hand-waving will transform the victims into ‘combatants’ who may be lawfully targeted with lethal force, which is the linguistic legerdemain relied upon by the administration to drag this dispute into the domain of lawful warfare.”
Lawyer Joseph Margulies:
“This vision of politics—technocrats pulling just the right levers to secure just enough votes—is not just sterile and unappealing. It also has real consequences of its own, contributing to the prevailing sense that strategists and politicians don’t really care about what they are saying or doing.”
02.10.2025 19:00 — 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0“These memos are not difficult to draft; a competent law student could write one. It wouldn’t be compelling as a matter of law—in fact, it would be legal drivel—but it’s not meant to be compelling. It’s meant to establish conclusively the appearance of lawfulness.”
Joseph Margulies:
“More than anything else, Trump is a power-monger. He finds a compelling model in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strongman rule and the military arsenal that backs it up.” @sophiagoodfriend.bsky.social
02.10.2025 18:00 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
“It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love,” Freud wrote three years before Hitler became chancellor of Germany, “so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”
02.10.2025 17:26 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0This is a good analysis
27.09.2025 21:56 — 👍 9 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
I wrote for the @bostonreview.bsky.social about the extraordinary Andrée Blouin, along with Lumumba, Cesaire, Fanon, and the anticolonial revolution that could have been.
02.10.2025 14:54 — 👍 85 🔁 31 💬 1 📌 1
Pynchon’s Vond “sees that the American future lies in the routing of all definitions of freedom through the ever-narrowing channel of security. His is a magisterial vision of a republic fashioned, top to bottom, on the model of a never-ending war waged against elements internal to the nation.”
01.10.2025 20:41 — 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0“I like to point out the absurdity in football… But the same critiques apply tenfold to the technocrats who believe we can data-drive our way to optimal policy and politics. Lily Hu recently wrote a phenomenal review of this bizarre mindset in the Boston Review.”
Read it here:
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“Blouin’s very birth troubled a colonial order erected on a strict racial hierarchy. She would make sure that her life would be far more of a problem for it.”
@sandipto.bsky.social reviews MY COUNTRY, AFRICA, the autobiography of the anticolonial revolutionary published by @versobooks.bsky.social
“They are forced to say, pathetically, that what the Trump administration has done is unlawful, instead of insisting, without hesitation or equivocation, that it is wrong.” www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
01.10.2025 16:45 — 👍 20 🔁 12 💬 0 📌 0This is a great article, and this line in particular struck me:
"We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."
The whole thing is worth a read
At a time when so many publications are choosing paths of capitulation and/or condescension, it's important to celebrate (&, if possible, subscribe to) those who are doing the work. @bostonreview.bsky.social is definitely near the top of that list.
01.10.2025 12:24 — 👍 37 🔁 11 💬 1 📌 0
