Structural things are structural, declining trust in universities edition

Sometimes I have Questions about a Discourse and then I remember I can Mind My Own Business. I should be an influencer, or an evangelist proclaiming the virtues of Mind Your Own Business, Nobody's Talking to You.

On this third year anniversary of the war in Sudan we woke up to the devastating news that our friend and comrade Muzan Al Neel has passed away. She was a brilliant revolutionary thinker, writer and organizer and a wonderful human.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un

Stand with Kali Akuno: Help a Movement Builder Heal Kali Akuno—co-founder of Cooperation Jackson and a lifelong movement builder—is facing a serious and urgent health crisis. He needs immediate access to specialized cardiac care that he simply cannot g...

"Kali Akuno—co-founder of Cooperation Jackson and a lifelong movement builder—is facing a serious and urgent health crisis. He needs immediate access to specialized cardiac care that he simply cannot get in Mississippi."

please give what you can if you can!

chuffed.org/project/1771...

Tomorrow at Harvard--

California’s $20 Fast Food Wage Hike Didn’t Kill Jobs, New Study Finds The data-driven study pushes back against multiple industry-backed reports that cast a grim light on the higher wage.

In their third report on the subject, researchers reach the same conclusions that have twice bedeviled the anti-wage hike sector of the restaurant industry: California’s $20 an hour fast food minimum wage, instituted in 2024, did not reduce employment.

Victim in ICE Shooting Suffered at Least Six Wounds, His Lawyer Says

ICE agents shot another driver -- on Tues.

He had just asked to call his wife.

They shot him six times. One bullet his jaw.

Now he can't speak and has been mostly unconscious.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/u...

I think that it is necessary for both writer and audience to agree that the process of writing is a distinctive act of consciousness. It teaches us something about being alive and asks riddles in a way that is peculiar to itself, and perhaps that really is enough.

—Hortense Spillers

We need to talk about Steph Curry Y’all.

New Unruly Subjects!
Steph Curry, Israeli tech, & the politics of sports-washing. Chenjerai talks w/ Dave Zirin & Demetrius Noble about how star power gets used to normalize war, occupation, & profit. Wherever you get podcasts. pod.link/1849696769/e...

A picture of the cover of Kathi Weeks's new book, along with an announcement of a webinar conversation between her and Sophie Lewis discussing the book.

I'm thrilled to be hosting an @intellpublics.bsky.social conversation between Kathi Weeks & @reproutopia.bsky.social on Weeks's new @dukepress.bsky.social book "Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures." Monday April 20th at 6:30 PM ET by Zoom webinar. Register here! gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Israel is destroying Lebanon.

I haven’t seen this bop here yet.

Screen capture from the Duke UP website of Laughing at the End of the World: Unsettling Laughter in Black Literature. A center image of books stacked acts as a placeholder, noting that a cover image is coming soon.

I would wait until April Fool’s Day to post this, but it’s no trick!

Laughing at the End of the World has a pub date! And it’ll be in one of my favorite series @dukepress.bsky.social.

I ask a modest question: if a primary function of people who control government bureaucracy in an unequal society is to control poor and marginalized people and to prevent social movements from achieving more serious change that weakens bureaucratic power and reduces the wealth of the wealthiest people in that society, might government bureaucracies use surveillance technology to further those ends rather than to make themselves less violent? This question helps us see an enormous opportunity cost that we suffer when we promote “reforms” that do not alter the size and power of the systems that cause us harm. In the final analysis, the contemporary push for body cameras is based on a strange notion of “accountability.” The cameras mean (rare) consequences for individual "bad apple" police officers, but a bolstering of the power of police generally. A “reform” like the body camera is therefore the exact opposite of accountability because, from the perspective of the interests behind the policing bureaucracy, body cameras are a reward.

This article on the body camera is exceptionally good, and contains several insights generalizable beyond one particular surveillance technology. campuspress.yale.edu/yjll/volume-...

Two French companies that process gum arabic are fueling the war in Sudan. See film below. Sudan produces 80% of the world's gum arabic used to produce candy, soft drinks, cosmetics etc...it's the one Sudanese product that was never placed under Euro-American sanctions. 3ayin.com/en/gum-arabi...

I know there's a lot going on

But what the US is doing to Cuba is unconscionable

I'm intrigued. The scene I'm thinking of occurs early on, and it's Aunt Nancy (I think) making a case for aesthetic pluralism: the heart expands and contracts. But I also remember a challenge to what counts as the center anyway in a book concerned with "centrist ordeal[s]."

Orthogonal, but Derrida writing about the heart in light of Jean-Luc Nancy's heart transplant was always moving to me (On Touching). And near the beginning of Bedouin Hornbook, Mackey's character refer metaphorically to the heart needing to expand as well as contract. Also orthogonal, I suppose.

Your weekly reminder that this comes from a speech against Am*zon & other profiteers, and which ends:

"We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom."

The US government collected over $1 billion in immigration fees then refused to process the applications. No denials. No refunds. Just silence. This is the largest fee fraud in the history of the American immigration system. Here's what's happening. 🧵

This is absolutely the intent--faculty need to be united in rejecting this kind of automation (more accurately: abdication), no matter how "safe" you think your position might be now.

Toni Cade Bambara said, “Writing is one of the ways I participate in struggle… to join the chorus of voices that argues that exploitation and misery are neither inevitable nor necessary.”

“I don’t know all my readers, but I know well for whom I write.”

This is an excellent piece that’s worth your time and answers some questions I had.

ICE says it provides 'proper meals.' Detainees see crystalized jelly, rancid beans and iced bologna In the business of immigration detention, researchers say, "bad food is the business model."

“Chronic hunger” at American concentration camps reported by USA Today.
www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...

Darkness falls in Havana as Cuba hit by total electricity blackout.

The latest blackout comes as the United States pursues its oil blockade against the island

When I wrote about Spillers, I dont think I emphasized enough Ellisons'a importance to her thinking as I understand it. And her citation of Ellison shows a characteristic gesture: adding the missing term--complicity--that clarifies the relations of power, exploitation, domination otherwise missing.

"There is, in fact, an element of antagonistic cooperation involved in socio-cultural work, from whatever vantage one is situated. The degree to which cooperation can be distinguished from complicity, or consensus from compromise, calls for discernment of the nicest sort[.]"

- Hortense J. Spillers

Thank you. I heard about the phenomenon from musician friends who found fakes on Spotify, then I started seeing them on other platforms. It's disturbing.

Thanks, I hadn't seen this. I'm not so much interested in mainstream, and (acknowledging I haven't read the article) I don't think it's exactly impersonation but something like identity theft--using a famous name as a lure.