Blog / Our America

On White Hysteria

December 25, 2019 - By Jim Hicks

With less than a thousand words (in her recent preface to a New York magazine photographic portfolio by Mark Peterson, with additional reporting by James D. Walsh), Claudia Rankine has offered what is, for her, a typically eloquent and essential assessment of the state of our nation. She begins with Dylann Storm Roof, the young assassin that in 2015 killed nine African Americans at prayer in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; she then notes Roof’s ongoing exchange of letters with Billy Roper, head of the Shield Wall Network, a white nationalist group in Arkansas.

“‘I have...

The Awakening of Dignity

December 10, 2019 - By Manuel Garcia

The ongoing crisis in Chile has brought the country to a standstill, unsettling the daily lives of all citizens. However, it has done more than just that. Mass protests have a way of altering the personhood of everyone involved in ways previously unimagined. Over the last week, thirty days after the eruption of social unrest, I have talked extensively with four people from Santiago who have lived the uprising from the ground up. Here I will share some of their experiences and testimonies during this process. To the best of my knowledge, none of them know each other. Let me introduce them to you now.

Maria is thirty-eight years old, married and the mother of two. She is self-employed as a baker and works mostly from her home in La Pintana. La Pintana is one of the most spatially...

Waging Peace in Memory

November 11, 2019 - By Jason A. Higgins

One hundred and one years since the end of the First World War, militarism still pervades American culture, and our collective amnesia about our own history puts the world at great risk. In 1973, the year American forces pulled out of Vietnam, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, about the end of WWI:

“It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day...

The Witch of Hadley: Mary Webster, the Weird, and the Wired

October 15, 2019 - By Anna Smith

Art: “Examination of a Witch,” Thompkins H. Matteson, 1853, detail.  Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA.

Perhaps I stayed up too late. Perhaps I didn’t need to go downstairs right at midnight to look up the Witch of Hadley (my little town—the farming community between Amherst and Northampton, home to prime farmland, big box stores, and some very interesting dead people).

I spent an hour reading about Mary Webster: how she lived down the street from me (a stone’s throw from where I sat, shivering in the dark, entranced by the screen), how they accused her of witchcraft, sent her to Boston where she was acquitted—and where, a year and a half later, she was accused again. I probably now know more than necessary about my town’s famous...

The Kids are Right

September 20, 2019 - By The Editors

(Hamburg, Germany. Early estimates report over 50,000 protesters today, participating in the Global Climate Strike.)

In a recent, as yet unpublished work, the Italian writer and activist Erri De Luca salutes the youth of today and welcomes the rise and return of a generation of activists: "Today’s youth know the risks they run, but they also know, with greater force and reason, the avalanche of accumulated ruin hanging over them. They know it’s there, perched on the slope above them, ready to fall with the next increase in temperature. For this reason, the vocal chord of a collective prophet vibrates through them."

When it comes to the environment devastion we've wrought, the crimes of my own and all previous generations are unpardonable. And yet...