Still from Francis Alÿs' Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (Strait of Gibraltar, Morocco-Spain), 2008: 'A line of kids each carrying a boat made out of a shoe leaves Europe in the direction of Morocco, while a second line of kids with shoe-boats leaves Africa in the direction of Spain. The two lines will meet on the horizon.'
On display as part of The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, an exhibition exploring 'both real and imaginary geographies, reconstructing personal and collective tales of migration.'
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[I]f you haven’t been moved by now by the many reports of abuses, injustices, in-custody deaths, and bodies that have turned up in the borderlands, then you cannot be moved.
Tina Vasquez, 'The Image America Shouldn't Need.' NYRDaily, 6/27/2019.
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Saying, 'This is rape!' or 'That is a concentration camp!' or 'The government is abusing innocent children!' is not having the desired effect, because the president and his allies are leeching the powerful stigma attached to these crimes.
Josephine Livingstone, 'The Death of Taboo.' The New Republic, 6/27/2019.
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Doreen St. Felix, "Trump, the Squad, and the 'Standard Definition' of Racism." The New Yorker, 7/16/2019.
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The regulators of news language recognize that to evaluate a person, an event, or a phenomenon as racist is to do just that: to evaluate and observe the situation, and to listen to the facts. Not to breed doubt or inaccuracy where precision and lean language ought to live—e.g.: the sky is blue. Or: the President is racist.
Doreen St. Felix, "Trump, the Squad, and the 'Standard Definition' of Racism." The New Yorker, 7/16/2019.
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Legitimizing complete irresponsibility is also exactly why the mainstream, respectable GOP eventually embraced Trumpism. It’s a force that protects the monstrously unfair world they’ve built.
Alex Pareene, 'Teenage Pricks: Trumpism's brand of boy power.' The Baffler, No. 45.
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Rebecca Solnit: 'Monsters rule over us, on behalf of monsters.'
Nathan Heller, 'The Hidden Cost of GoFundme Healthcare.' The New Yorker, 7/1/2019.
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Bad News, a game where 'players gain followers and credibility by going through a number of scenarios, each focusing on one of six strategies commonly used in the spread of misinformation [impersonating people online, using emotional language, polarization, conspiracy theories, discrediting opponents, and trolling people online].'
It was designed by researchers to see if they could 'pre-emptively debunk, or ‘pre-bunk,’ fake news by exposing people to a weak dose of the methods used to create and spread disinformation, so they have a better understanding of how they might be deceived,' and it seems to work.
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Stories dictate their own span: beginning, middle, resolution. This is not how major change happens, and the strength of social storytelling—its ability to make problems seem individual and ordered—can also become a weakness. Storytelling looks past all the interlocking motions of society in favor of the personal, the private, the atomized view ... We risk building a theatre in which individuals are led onstage, told to perform their moving stories, showered individually with cash and allyship, and then summarily dispatched. In general, the people who benefit most reliably from our storytelling moment—the people in power and in control—aren’t the speakers but the stage managers. Many right-minded journalists, if pressed, would admit to feeling an undertow of awkwardness about trying to stir an audience of peers by trawling for stories that expose the suffering of people whom they’d never write about in good fortune.
Nathan Heller, 'The Hidden Cost of GoFundme Healthcare.' The New Yorker, 7/1/2019.
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