I saw two radically different versions of what a quilt could be yesterday and yet they spoke to the same issues. I caught the show Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California at the Berkeley Art Museum Sunday afternoon. I love quilts and while I could love them purely
There's been a lot of fuss about Trump recently calling female journalists "stupid" and "piggy" though there's nothing really new about his misogyny toward that sub-population (I am so old I remember 2016 candidate Trump saying weird things about Megyn Kelly when
Everything changed in the last few weeks. The Republicans, assumed by themselves and too many others, to be unstoppable got stopped again and again. Public opinion manifested in many ways: as an election that went hard against them, by a once-loyal Trumpist who turned on him, as a remarkable shift
It's striking to me that a lot of people want politics to be about their personal feelings, in which case they're not engaged in politics, though they may be engaged in the sabotage of politics. This is why I declared that "voting is a chess
A young white woman in yoga clothes berating masked ICE agents in a parking lot this spring. A pope speaking up again and again for immigrants. Furious judges dressing down the Trump administration and ruling against it time after time after time, in response to the blizzard of lawsuits filed
When word went out that border patrol agents had been sent to the Coast Guard island off Alameda near Oakland on the eve of October 23, Bay Area residents sprang into action. Before dawn the next morning, valiant locals began a blockade of the island, which is connected to Alameda
In 2022, the tech critic and privacy advocate Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe what's happened on the Internet to a lot of the most widely used platforms: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Spotify. He writes: "First, platforms are good to their users; then they
This is the first guest essay at Meditations in an Emergency. I'm proud to bring you yesterday's speech by the great Cleve Jones, who has for nearly half a century been a key organizer for the global queer community and the San Francisco Bay Area, gave
Portlanders deploying inflatable animal costumes, a brass band, mass ukulele renditions of “This Land Is Your Land,” naked bike rides, and other tactics in their ICE protests are undermining the Trump administration’s lurid claims that Portland, Oregon, is a “war-torn” city under siege by a violent left. It’s
Many people seem to love sweeping generalizations. Not all people, but lots of people I come across trying to discuss the politics of our time fall back on pretending that a category of people is homogenous as in all its members hold the same positions. If categories were indeed airtight
An Army Called ICE Is Already Waging a Domestic War (This is a series of short essay-reports, beginning with the worst – ICE and attacks on immigrants and ending with the best – what we can do and a brief homage to Jane Goodall.) A lot of us have assumed that somehow
Tuesday, hundreds of highly skilled professionals were forced to sit in the room where their inferiors in all but rank staged long, pointless, hateful, ignorant, and undisciplined performances. Such a gathering of all top military leadership is unprecedented in modern times, a major security risk, and a big insult to