Benjamin Kunkel

Did a TV Show Hurt You? ‘Fix-Its’ Offer Justice Beloved characters are killed. Romances, too. But a subset of fan-fiction writers are taking matters into their own hands, “fixing” perceived wrongs.

new frontiers in the demand for art to directly gratify and intolerance for representation

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/a...

Thank you!

Opinion | Trump is killing one of our strongest exports The president wants to balance U.S. trade deficits? He can’t do it without this industry he hates.

Last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined.
wapo.st/4luJyph

Trading in two stocks surged before Trump family appointments announced Experts view sharp rises in share price and turnover of Unusual Machines and Dominari as ‘clearly unusual’

www.ft.com/content/1d9e...

I don't suppose the SEC might want to look into this?

The Sameness of Different Things, by Benjamin Kunkel Reading a new translation of Capital

I wrote about an obscure German contribution to the critique of political economy, for @harpers.bsky.social harpers.org/archive/2025...

difficult to overstate how bad it would be for this effort to succeed

Some day we'll see the headline and people will cheer in the streets

Trump's Counterterror Czar Proposes Terror Charges for Political Opponents Either you love America or you don’t, he says

In which our old friend Sebastian Gorka, Senior Director for Counterterrorism, suggests critics of the Trump administration be charged with "aiding and abetting terrorism": “Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.” www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-cou...

The Sameness of Different Things, by Benjamin Kunkel Reading a new translation of Capital

Benjamin Kunkel (@kunktation.bsky.social) reviews Paul Reitter’s translation of Capital.

“The task of reading Capital naïvely acquires a fresh jolt of plausibility in the case of Paul Reitter’s new translation of volume one,” writes Kunkel.

harpers.org/archive/2025...

Social Security Lists Thousands of Migrants as Dead to Prompt Them to ‘Self-Deport’ By placing migrants in Social Security’s “death master file,” the Trump administration is seeking to cut off their access to credit cards, bank accounts and other financial services.

“The list included a 13-year-old and seven other minors. . . For now the immigrants added are being given supposed dates of death.”

Team Trump Is Gaming Out How to Ship U.S. Citizens to El Salvador Donald Trump’s administration is talking internally about denaturalizing American citizens — and potentially sending some to El Salvador.

"Trump administration officials have discussed possibly denaturalizing and deporting activists and other individuals whom they label as having committed so-called 'fraud' on their applications for citizenship by subsequently supporting what Team Trump decides are 'pro-terrorist' causes or groups."

fucking monstrous

If you are
1) a federal civil servant/contractor ordered not to release scheduled data or reports, or
2) an academic who has lost access to government data in the past week
...please get in touch. I'm happy to keep our conversations confidential.
crampell[@]washpost[dot]com

Trump’s Immigration Threats Are Already Wrecking the Food Industry Immigrant farm workers are too scared to show up to work.

About 75% of immigrant farm workers did not show up for work this week in Bakersfield, California, as the threat of Trump’s immigration raids looms.

Apollinaire's great poem "The Little Car," about feeling an era end, and another begin, from one day day to the next www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/apo...

Insurers brace for losses of up to $20bn from California wildfires JPMorgan analysts double estimates as blazes continue to rage

“Expectations of economic losses stemming from the fires have more than doubled since yesterday to closer to $50 billion,” JPMorgan wrote in a note to clients.’ www.ft.com/content/db2c...

Call me sour, but EVERY mention of this "victory" should acknowledge that it's funded entirely by the profits of ongoing fossil-fuel production.

Since the IEA said "no more new oil and gas fields if we are to hit net zero by 2050" in 2021, Norway has issued >150 new production licenses.

“The only clue that users seemingly had of Siri's alleged spying was eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden,”
What a colossal gaslight that was.

Where the next financial crisis could emerge As the IMF has warned, the rise and rise of private credit brings systemic risks

'Private credit funds pose systemic risks to the financial system because of their interrelationship with the regulated banking sector, the opacity of the terms of loans, their illiquid nature, etc. No prizes for guessing where the next financial crisis will emerge' www.ft.com/content/b75b...

How an Enthusiast of Soviet Socialism Fell Afoul of the Authorities Andrei Platonov’s “Chevengur” depicts a Communist utopia, but Stalin loathed his writing, calling the author “scum.”

3) And a review for @newyorker.com of Platonov's impossibly great CHEVENGUR: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Prairie Dogs | Benjamin Kunkel | Granta ‘After making sure our guests all had the drinks and/or drugs they required, I put on a Sun Ra record.’ A short story by Benjamin Kunkel.

2) A not entirely unrelated short story for @grantamag.bsky.social: granta.com/prairie-dogs/

The Intractable Puzzle of Growth For more than a century, the key measure of a healthy economy has been its capacity to grow and yet if production and consumption continues to expand at their current rate we might risk the very healt...

Probably the three things I wrote over the past year I'm happiest with are these. 1) Long essay on (de)growth in
@thenation: www.thenation.com/article/econ...

World endures 'decade of deadly heat' as 2024 caps hottest years on record UN secretary general, António Guterres, says ‘we must exit this road to ruin’ in annual new year message

Then we came to the end of another hot and lurid year www.theguardian.com/world/2024/d...

Isn’t this simply true? A world where there is less economic growth _is_ a more zero sum world. We can’t avoid distributional struggles when the pie isn’t growing. The already rich and wealthy have been winning these struggles for 45 years.

Twenty-day-old baby dies of cold in Gaza, fifth such fatality this winter Jumaa al-Batran is fifth infant to die from winter-related causes as Israeli genocide causes harsh living conditions.

As other people have pointed out, every child in Gaza who dies of exposure is a victim of Israel's genocide just as surely as one whom its snipers shoot in the head www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12...