Why I donate to Planned Parenthood
I don’t recall the first time I donated to Planned Parenthood. It might have been online. It might have been on the street. I’m not sure. But I will always remember why.
pays de naissance
Rape, and a glimpse into the future
“He thought I was a baby-raper,” he said. “I explained that we were just friends.” “Rape?” “When you fuck someone without their wanting it,” Ignacio said. “Sex is like a game. It takes two people – or more, I guess, if you want – to play, and both players have to agree to the rules …
Identity politics: or why demographic sticker shock is no excuse.
I really wasn’t going to write about the election. It’s been covered quite well elsewhere already. I think Dan Hodges’ piece on the subject in The Telegraph nails it: For years the GOP has been sitting on a ticking demographic time bomb. And this was the election it finally detonated. The Democrats already went into …
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An update, and some thoughts on pessimism.
There are a lot of titles I could have gone with, here. LA Story. LA Confidential. Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom. Postcards from the Edge. American Idiot. But nothing I can think of really fits. I’m still stuck in the United States. I’m staying with my former roommate from my Seattle years, and …
The Detroit Step
From Detroit “The Detroit Step is what New Yorkers do when you tell them where you’re from,” the man said. We met outside Comerica Park, the new stadium for the Detroit Tigers. I was hanging off the fence, taking a photo. I was informed that this was the exact reason why the stadium had been …
About Bordertown
Tomorrow, I’m heading to the Detroit Design Festival, where I’ll be creating my very first art installation for the Bordertown design group. The group has contributed costumes, games, souvenirs from aborted utopias, and other wonderful things. My piece is a series of design fictions about the future of border security in Istanbul. I based those …
On the death of bin Laden
Like many of my generation, I greeted the death of Osama bin Laden with frantic text messaging. Then tweeting, then emailing and strangely, housekeeping. At three a.m., I turned on a vacuum. Two minutes later, I shut it off. The BBC continued confirming what I had heard hours earlier. He was dead. We had killed …
A rapist in every Jefferies tube: Detroit, design, and our dreams of space
A friend linked me to this stunning gallery of photos at the Guardian of Detroit, in ruins. As noted in the margins, large swathes of Detroit now more closely resemble the set of a post-apocalyptic film than they do an actual city. Aged and beautiful buildings have been left to rot. Even the books are …
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How I spent the Fourth of July in Canada
From Toronto Photographing tall ships, getting sunburned, and coming home for our annual re-watch of JAWS. Oh yeah, and finishing the re-writes of my novel. The latest iteration now rests comfortably in my agent’s inbox, and I would have done a celebratory dance of some sort once I clicked “send,” had it not been a …
Officer punches girl; Internet approves.
On June 14, a bystander shot this video of a Seattle police officer punching a 17-year-old girl in the face during an altercation with her 19-year-old cousin. My pal David Forbes tweeted this bit of news to me this afternoon, and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around both the video and the responses …