Originality emerges as a fetish in the era of imperial primitive accumulation but becomes reified as a commodity precisely when bourgeois identity assumes the arc of professional mobility—which is to say, when careerism becomes banalized.

"Appiah’s role models include himself." -- Nikil Saval

I planned my cross country road trip around college towns to avoid sundown towns. Champaign (IL) was hideous. Lawrence (KS) was a gem.

About genocide they were wrong, The Old Masters: how little they understood Its liberal position; how it takes place While someone else is obsessing about the ’28 primaries, or whether a watermelon is an antisemitic trope, or just wanting to not think of Palestine again.

The inimitable Steven Salaita on Jewishness, Zionism, and the exigencies of genocide stevesalaita.com/the-ugly-exi...

You know how most thinkers periodize using historical inflection points (e.g. the 1968 uprisings; or the 1973 oil crisis)? I’m looking for inflection points drawn from everyday life in the 21st c.—practices/events that are not overtly political/economic but are symptomatic of deeper structural turns

As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a Coloradan returneth to elect Michael Bennet governor.

Sundown empire

You can’t hate Mbembe enough, either

Boots Riley on "I Love Boosters": "Well everyone knows every artwork in the racial capitalocene is an experiment in genre flailing. What this movie presupposes is... maybe it isn't." capaciousjournal.com/article/genr...

Every single time I use the word "downstream" I can feel Stuart Hall's eyes boring into my back.

Now do the red-brown podcasters

Your mission after the revolution, should you choose to accept it, is to deincel masses of philosophers resentful that they never received the fame they deserved by naming thought experiments after them.

A good question. The answer is to be found in the U.S. being a herrenvolk settler colony (hence structurally constituted on the antagonisms of race, class, and gender) and that, more, it is a global empire (meaning it creates and absorbs global surplus populations across technical and manual fields)

Having one of those days when my hatred of Israel is so visceral it feels like a heart attack. And maybe it is.

I don’t think you hate Kwame Anthony Appiah enough.

It’s kind of wryly amusing that the philosophers and historians here are playing the role of the native informant to the dark continent of academia.

Few things feel as inevitable as the overwhelming representation of analytic philosophers amongst the useful fools deputized to lead the Selbstgleichschaltung of the academy. thihttps://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2026/06/State-of-Scholarship-Report.pdf

Every single institution chock-full of self-avowed Nazis and amoral careerists. There are many names for this phenomenon but my personal favorite is a “a dying empire led by bad people."

@loonspeak.bsky.social www.e-flux.com/journal/100/...

Everything is horrible now, even trash bags

The good news: We are living in the golden age of the theater of the everyday The bad news: In every work of mediocrity we recognize our own derivative thoughts; they come back to us with a certain abject familiarity.

Zohran Mamdani's theory of politics is "think globally, act locally," but the only problem is that the politics of the racial capitalocene is predicated on the fungibilization of the local.

I'm always genuinely impressed by Achille Mbembe's inexhaustible capacity to churn out platitudes to his adoring fans www.geeska.com/en/africa-no...

Yesterday I went to a magnificent poetry reading on "Muslim Feminist Poetics" with Ather Zia, Dena Harry Saleh, Umniya Najaer, and Salwa Kazi. Dr. Ather Zia's book, "In Kashmir: Writing Under Occupation" is available in open access here atherzia.com

Hacks like Len Gutkin have been deputized to root around for post hoc rationalizations for Trumpian thuggery and they are somehow even more contemptible that they imagine themselves the vanguard of some high-minded university reform movement www.chronicle.com/article/we-n...

In those (now blessedly rare) moments when I’m bemused by Jacobin and Mother Jones’ mastheads, I find it helpful to remember Patrick Wolfe’s term, “repressive authenticity.”

Because I don't have this ability, I have an endless fascination with people who sound as brilliant in oral conversation/discussion as they are on the page.

Trump’s idea that every single person is suited to play particular roles because of how they look remains the most quintessential USian thing about him

Ironically*, a Marxism that does not have a robust theory of subjectivity ends up being the purest form of idealism newleftreview.org/sidecar/post... *** Actually, dialectically

As if my self-loathing couldn’t be more acute, today I learned that I may have played a role in the ascendance to power of a federalist society ghoul.

One Day, Everyone But Palestinians Will Have Always Won A Pulitzer For Saying They Were Against This

how demoralizing to be in a community that rarely if ever understands the force of the fight for knowledge. the work of relationality is deeply needed, is ongoing, but could be pushed to do more.

What makes the megalomaniacal fascist buffoon—Donald Trump, Javier Milei, Narendra Modi, Rigathi Gachagua, Yoon Suk Yeol—funny?

The word “throughput” always sounds to me like something an anarcho-communist novelist coined to satirize U.S. corporate jargon.

Knowledge in the humanities mainly advances through argumentation and it's a huge loss when critical schools become nothing else but indexes of social and status networks and affects.

Under the actually existing regime that we have to endure, it’s not enough that capital hates labor, but it has to select personnel that have a deep and abiding hatred for the very industries that they are profiting obscenely from.

The problem for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s opinion section is that the central truth of academia - there’s a group of politicians out to destroy it and an administrative class which is happy to help - can’t be said to their subscribers.

Funny that the New Literalism cannot abide movie trailer voiceovers and the sitcom laugh track

The cunning of op-ed reason need not be nakedly ideological as @danfarina.bsky.social points out here

Jamelle Bouie's columns have always struck me as making a larger point about historical and structural dysfunctions in the U.S. so it's kind of striking that his headline writers and opinion editors are determined to reduce his columns to a singular obsession with Trump

Keir Starmer is a living demonstration that being savaged by a dead sheep is pretty horrific, actually.

Hysterical ressentiment is particularly corrosive to labor solidarity because unlike, say, envy which is catalyzed by vertical relationships, its most potent fantasies are forged in relation to horizontal, lateral, peer relationships (the sibling, the co-worker, the co-religionist, the partner).

What’s the catchiest period name that describes the Trump regime’s destruction of knowledge and scholarship?

The horrendous scale of rightwing anti-intellectualism is truly staggering www.texastribune.org/2026/04/10/t...

Reactionary white liberals and conservatives are incapable of saying anything original in the Trump era other than repurposing different iterations of the perversity thesis www.chronicle.com/article/elis...

Dr. Helyeh Doutaghi’s "Still, Minab" www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYd8...

Ressentiment-mongers like Sam Haselby, David Austin Walsh and Tyler Austin Harper desperately want to believe that they are held in contempt by the left for supervening ideological reasons, but the truth is far more banal—they are just fundamentally dishonest people.