If the strategy of reciprocity made it possible to survive the disaster of colonialism, it could also be a response that makes non-capitalist technological innovation possible.
It had been sixty years since Mommy Mae left Tchula, Mississippi for Chicago, and she still believed that education was a salve for the systemically bruised. I wasn’t as sure, but journeyed to Iowa City on the fuel of her faith.
When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain. Were you entitled to it? Was it real?
People kept telling him how good he was. They spoke about his fluidity, his ease in the role. All this fuss surprised him. There was no trick, he thought. You just had to believe it.
These whimsical miniature street systems are at the heart of what my mom thinks is vital and good. They are utopias she is building — strange, if somewhat boring, microparadises where everyone obeys traffic laws.
Motherland was something without content or form, something utterly abstract — something that, in relation to a country like this, could only occupy the minds of those who’d never had it.
Fresh out of grad school, the British charity hired me to identify new economic opportunities for the impoverished communities of Turkana. Were they delusional, or was I?
The part we see is just the fruit; there’s a whole network of fungi underground, a system underneath the forest floor that sustains the trees, carries nutrients in white webs.
The next installment in the Memory Loss series, exploring public and private remembrance in New York City, unearths the complex lives of living memorials.