"Ultimately, he said, this secret knowledge is how the magician derives power. It’s only through keeping their methods unknown that they can exert their wonders over the audience, tricking them & making them doubt the normal causal relations of our world."
strangematters.coop/vegas-magici...
"I freelanced at one DAO for a month when I was in between jobs, and it was fine...Put another way, I found myself gigging at a majority-freelancer startup."
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"A Trump regime, if it is able to consolidate itself at all, will be weak, poor, and dysfunctional compared even to recent iterations of the federal government – and as a result, it will be unable to exert control over the entirety of the present-day US."
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"Was I dreaming? All of a sudden anything seemed creepily, wrongly possible. Every shadow and ambient sound around us loomed with a new and horrible potential."
strangematters.coop/cryptid-madi...
Drawing on blue background of two women one with a hammer and an anvil, other with a sickle. One carries a book. With the words Free Women in Spanish across the top
Drawing on blue background of two women one with a hammer and an anvil, other with a sickle. One carries a book. With the words Free Women in Spanish across the top
We are working on our poster pocketbooks on the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. Volume 2 will include this graphic, the front cover of issue 11 of the historic magazine Mujeres Libres.
Not 100% happy with the clean up job - so we aren't going to be printing it - but it's up on our website.
A deeply humane and sensible take by @lastpositivist.bsky.social on a recent spat on philosophy Substack, which -- like so many of his other brilliant writings on the subject -- doubles as a mini-manifesto for abolishing the analytic-continental divide.
sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2026/04/ther...
Cardinal Cupich: "We're dehumanizing the victims of war by turning the suffering of people & killing of children & our own soldiers into entertainment. To splice together movie cuts w/ actual bombings & targeting of people for purposes of entertainment is sickening. This is not who we are."
Automatic Draft Registration Would Expand U.S. Surveillance State: Antiwar Activist
Schrodinger’s citizen under neo-fascism: w/o extensive documentation we cannot possibly verify who is eligible to vote, yet who is eligible for military conscription is immediately obvious and already known
"Techniques – such as close-ups, wide shots, tracking shots, blocking, color design, editing – are themselves sources of exploration, as much a mystery one plunges into as a new character that grows from a writer’s vision."
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"[I]n any workforce, clique, community, or other such gathering of people, you’ll find select individuals that tend to be at the center of the place’s social relations. They’re the ones who are the ‘glue’ that holds together different friend groups."
strangematters.coop/mcdonalds-un...
"For the rich, paying for someone to fetch you things that you could fetch yourself is convenient and cheap. It also satisfies a deep seated psychological desire among the wealthy to be served."
strangematters.coop/gorillas-eur...
*cough*
READ HERE: strangematters.coop/supply-chain...
11. Interlude #2 Feeling the Current in Morro Bay
12. Aria for Arzner
13. Solvang (Is There a Future Here for the Great Danes?)
strangematters.coop/two-new-albu...
"They started with 35 members paying $1 each to join. This grew to 125 members, each with equity of $1,200 by the end of their first year in 1937...[I]n 1940 had 400 members, 4 employees, and...annual revenues of about $706,420 in today’s dollars."
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👀👀👀👀
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"She opens up her chat with Johan from Big Boyz Tactical. ‘Hi Johan. Are your guys on site?’ A white thumbs-up emoji comes back."
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"Efforts by national minorities to establish new states would only create new states under the control of the bourgeoisie, prone to waging war with one another and to oppressing their own national minorities."
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"While these new theories still paid lip service to equilibrium models, they gradually became less connected to them. Look closely enough at them, and you’ll realize they teach us there’s no need for an equilibrium concept whatsoever."
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“Financially, it is awful because a lot of times Black women are already the breadwinner or everything is on our shoulders already." Constance Franklin, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from the article: What Happened to the Black Women Trump Purged From the Federal Work Force?
Portrait of Constance Franklin. Black woman with shoulder-length dark brown hair, facing camera, wearing a red and white striped dress.
For Issue No. 10, Natalie Y. Moore spoke with 4 Black women who were purged from the federal workforce by the White House’s DOGE agency. Each woman explained the stress, frustration, and drastic changes they’ve been forced to make in the months since. tinyurl.com/36hxmr72
The tenth issue of Hammer & Hope is now live!
This issue features 18 stories that offer our readers insights into a wide range of prescient political and cultural topics, from the community resistance in Minnesota and Ohio to the enduring legacy of D'Angelo and more.
Read here: hammerandhope.org
A truly lovely essay from the latest issue of @strangemattersmag.bsky.social, authored by my fellow Graeber fan and @thepointmag.bsky.social alum Clement Gelly!
Come for the philosophy, stay for the amazing stories of Vegas magicians and witch hunts.
Though this certainly wasn't Gelly's intent, we couldn't help but notice some parallels to our own philosophical manifesto from Issue One, which argues that social movements should move away from absolute social constructivism and back to ontology.
strangematters.coop/new-ontology...
And along the way, Gelly finds his master theory has some big holes in it.
The magicians teach him that the two realities aren't co-equal parallels both created by social construction. The magician knows the mechanisms by which an effect can be produced. This gives some power over others.
Gelly also talks about the history of magic tricks, and their interesting relationship to the witch hunt craze of the early modern period.
Not in the way you'd expect either: the first book on magic as tricks was written by someone trying to *prevent* people from being persecuted as witches!
But this theory gives way to experience that cannot be categorized: the wonderful, zany antics of magicians from all walks of life, their stories, their wisdom (or half-wisdom), their trickery.
Gelly, inspired by thinkers like David Graeber, drew an analogy between magicians and ruling classes.
Perhaps in a magic trick there are two worlds: the world where the magic is real, the world where it's a sleight of hand. Both genuinely created by the magician, sustained by our belief.
When we invent a concept, does our belief in it make it real? Or does reality insist upon its independence?
These questions, and more, haunt Clement Gelly in his various misadventures with the magicians & illusionists of the Las Vegas strip.
strangematters.coop/vegas-magici...
"Electoralists like to say that there are “no shortcuts,” which is true, but not in the way that they think. The real shortcut is believing that they will be able to seize the state through ceaseless electoral organizing, when real power is based on money."
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The New York Times, ICE, Epstein and his TERF associates: all institutions and powerful people whom we have written about this year.
All on a budget of less than $50,000.
Trans journalism just hits harder. And the more you fund us, the more we can do.
See how you can support TNN below:
"Suspended over this one-to-one-scale map of my doomed metropolis, I saw all at once the extent of the sickness that had fallen on New York in recent years; its symptoms were pustules of steel & glass jutting up out of a face I thought I had known my whole life."
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