Detroit on $1 Million a Day
A response to Ben Austen’s “Detroit Through Rose-Colored Glasses.”
https://www.guernicamag.com/joshua-akers-and-john-patrick-leary-detroit-on-1-million-a-day/
A response to Ben Austen’s “Detroit Through Rose-Colored Glasses.”
https://www.guernicamag.com/joshua-akers-and-john-patrick-leary-detroit-on-1-million-a-day/
Young people are making a difference in the cities they call home.
https://www.guernicamag.com/jay-walljasper-the-surprise-behind-detroits-emerging-comeback/
The greater Detroit area is the nexus of an entire host of progressive enterprises, notable for both the diversity of its participants and the diversity of its projects. |
Just as the NFL championship trophy returned to its roots with Vince Lombardi returning to Green Bay for the first time in 14 seasons, another standout of last night’s Super Bowl broadcast reminded the world where manufacturing innovation was invented — Detroit. |
“A lot of the interest comes from a sense that the city of Detroit isn’t just an exception to the rule of the United States that Detroit is, in some sense, the future of American cities ” |
Leary, author of this issue’s “Detroitism,” offers reading recommendations for putting together Detroit’s story, as well as the increasingly-familiar story of urban America in an era of prolonged economic crisis. |
What does “ruin porn” tell us about the motor city?
The urban-suburban divide in Detroit shows the need to treat a metropolitan area as a single organism, rooted in a sense of the commons.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing was less enthusiastic than his predecessor about turning Detroit’s ruins into farms. Not anymore.
In response to Mark Dowie ’s August 1 “Food Among the Ruins ”, a smattering of responses came from readers and around the web, including Treehugger, Freakonomics, and the Detroit Free Press.
To truly grasp how far America has fallen from the heights of its industrial grandeur — and to understand how that grandeur led to stupendous acts of folly — you should tour a set of ruins far from the Midwest rustbelt; they lie, in fact, deep (and nearly forgotten) in, of all places, the Brazilian Amazon rainforest.
When the wave of hope finally broke for Black America
We don’t need to talk much, because the ice speaks for us. What happens when it melts?
My Birth State can’t possibly drive interest
He says, “Here are some ways I think you can improve this week.”
On critical race theory
The author talks about the need for structural change in publishing, and why we should all be archivists of our family histories.
https://www.guernicamag.com/anjali-enjeti-politics-and-possibility/
The day after I found out my husband cheated, I licked a stripper’s titties.
I am gruff. I’m mediocre. I’m not good at getting what I mean into what I say. Mostly, I’m tired. The same lines, the same debates. Different stages. I’ve been dragged across too much of this country and I know it’s not getting better.
The writer on Camus, COVID-19, and the undoing of our meaningful lives.
https://www.guernicamag.com/claire-messud-life-among-the-animals/
The writer on blending fiction and memoir, and exploring the nature of celebrity.
Ms. Bird stood in front of the class, holding a bag of flour. “You’ll dress up your flour babies, you’ll name your flour babies, and your flour babies will go everywhere with you for two weeks.”
“It’s quite a lot of sadness, in realizing that everything you love about the world is falling to pieces.”
The political theorist argues that those whose worlds have been destroyed by five centuries of imperialism have the right to live near the objects that have been plundered from their culture.
https://www.guernicamag.com/miscellaneous-files-ariella-aisha-azoulay/
In the battle for hockey’s future, it’s a question of #grit vs. Gritty.
https://www.guernicamag.com/a-cold-white-sport-in-a-warming-world/
And my life went on like that: people coming and going, valuable things left in a hurry.
In the dark nights after long days, the music gave our fathers something to cling to.
https://www.guernicamag.com/with-jazz-on-the-turntable-and-a-drink-in-his-hand/
The tick doesn’t know that it is strong enough to kill a full-grown human. It only knows that it is hungry.
https://www.guernicamag.com/josh-potter-beautiful-in-the-distance/
“I like stories that helix on themselves and twist,” says the author of Instructions for a Funeral.
On the South Side, a monument to the former president’s legacy becomes a contest over the terms of gentrification.
https://www.guernicamag.com/what-does-the-obama-center-owe-chicago/
She and I both grew up near Detroit. How could she vote for Trump?
Why it’s okay to play with Manson family paper dolls: The first six installments of John Reed’s Manson Family Paper Doll book. Print & Color Yourself!
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-family-dolls-featuring-charlie-leslie-more/
You would not believe what the secret police is interested in. Fetishes, preferences, noises made in bed, how you brush your teeth.
The poet and sociologist’s gleefully unorthodox work on blackness.
Grappling with the legacy of the Algiers Motel Incident, half a century later.
When Ernest Hemingway agreed to his famous Paris Review interview, he had no idea he’d be helping the CIA.
https://www.guernicamag.com/george-plimpton-and-papa-in-cuba/
Three months after my father died, my blood clotted for the first time.
The Future of Cities: The Chicago-based urban design team on rebuilding neighborhoods, gentrification, and the “magic” of Theaster Gates.
https://www.guernicamag.com/beautiful-objects-blighted-spaces/
Sabrina Alli interviews Brett Story about her latest film, which unearths the presence of the prison system in our everyday geographies.
A look at the secret, defining force in a field largely comprised of autodidacts and bedroom enthusiasts
Darnell L. Moore and Kai M. Green write to each other about life as black feminists.
https://www.guernicamag.com/darnell-l-moore-kai-m-green-conversation-in-black/
A new exhibition in Pittsburgh explores the modernist past of the city’s architecture, and the way forward.
https://www.guernicamag.com/roslyn-bernstein-museum-as-laboratory/
An exhibition at the Jewish Museum brings together a group of largely unknown artists creating provocative and unexpected work.
Boundaries of Nature: Huge swaths of Detroit have been surrendered to the wild. What happens when we try to take them back?
https://www.guernicamag.com/ed-winstead-green-thumbs-in-the-motor-city/
The journalist on the “strange, extractive” process of interviewing; second-, third-, and fourth-act stories; and coming to reporting as “a real, whole person.”
Does Hollywood’s reboot obsession point to a more pervasive cultural trend?
https://www.guernicamag.com/james-orbesen-lets-party-like-its-1984/
Boundaries of Taste: The folklorist and curator on self-expression through adornment in African-American communities, and fashion as a political act.
“Some are really crazy,” the nurse said. “Others are just pretending.”
The sociologist on the role of the artist in gentrification, challenges to affordable housing, and the commodification of New York City’s loft lifestyle.
A squatter’s history of gentrification.
https://www.guernicamag.com/dw-gibson-dont-call-this-the-east-village/
There were so many places he could have lived, but he lived in the shack so he could dream of his daughter.
On community, urban sprawl, infant mortality, and the Albany food co-op.
https://www.guernicamag.com/elisa-albert-where-do-i-write-all-over-the-damn-place/
The writer on coming of age in dichotomous Baltimore and being warned against writing about race.
The former assistant secretary of education grapples with the school-reform movement and the systemic issues that plague American education.
Disregarding Hunter S. Thompson’s advice, Danny Lyon set off to “record and glorify the life of the American bikerider.”
The civil rights icon on Detroit, the limits of protest organizing, and what she’s learned over seven decades of activism.
RoboCop’s lessons for our time.
https://www.guernicamag.com/austerity-economics-is-like-a-kick-in-the-groin/
An empire in decline (city by city, town by town).
https://www.guernicamag.com/peter-van-buren-regime-change-in-america/
“Oh, it’s just so fabulous in New York, you can really just learn to step over people’s suffering bodies.” A response to Didion’s famed 1967 essay.
One hundred years later, why is George Herriman’s Krazy Kat still so radical?
“George Packer’s The Unwinding details the bitter realities of a stagnant economy, but leaves no room for malaise.”
https://www.guernicamag.com/abigail-sindzinski-a-nation-called-to-action/
The radical geographer explores the hidden, unmapped stories of his neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina.
What kind of person walks over the bones of slaves? / What kind of person is a slave to bones?
Muriel Rukeyser’s lost novel and the recovery of work by women writers
Why climate change won’t wait for the president.
https://www.guernicamag.com/bill-mckibben-obama-versus-physics/
The founders of Ecosocialist Horizons discuss climate change, the collapse of capitalism, and building a new world in the shell of the old.
https://www.guernicamag.com/joel-kovel-and-quincy-saul-apocalypse-and-revelation-are-the-same-word/
Notes on prison tourism.
Concerns over declining ‘civility’ in politics distract us from the meaningful disagreements that we need to have.
https://www.guernicamag.com/john-patrick-leary-against-civility/
The United States is in the midst of a tremendous building spree, but it isn’t happening in America.
https://www.guernicamag.com/nick-turse-americas-nation-building/
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and former White Stripe Jack White on what’s killing the humanity of performances, how the wrong teacher can “really mess you up,” and the power of the blues.
Everything that can be done to a man / was done to him.
The director of the Arab Association of New York talks with Meaghan Winter about mosque monitoring, civil liberties, and kids asking ‘why do they hate us?’
https://www.guernicamag.com/linda-sarsour-surveillance-and-the-city/
Writer and former radical bookstore owner Sean Stewart talks about his new book on the underground press that was so vital to ’60s counterculture.
Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap explores hip hop’s past but skims over important questions about its present.
Captivated by an image of an atom bomb falling on Japan, Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie asks American writers why “Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won’t.”
It’s a good thing when advertising makes you feel a little bit stupid.
On January 21, 2009, Barack Obama promised to return America to “the high moral ground.” Two and a half years later, we’re still waiting.
A photographer and former Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana observes the beauty of the dark and the politics of electricity. (With video.)
“The global media and many visiting photographers see Detroit as an abandoned and dead city What is constantly absent from these soulless images are the people.” |
David Simon would be happy to find out that The Wire was hyperbolic and ridiculous, and that the “American Century” is still to come. But he’s not betting on it.
“And so, for decades, that part of my childhood remained the dark but largely forgotten underside of the golden 1950s. I never thought I’d want it back, but with six nuclear plants threatening to melt down in Fukushima, Japan, I find that I do.” |
During 2005, while our author lived in East Jerusalem and worked in Ramallah and the Gaza Strip, he moved through at least four checkpoints every day. This is what that was like.
Conservative economists have it wrong. The underlying problem isn’t that so many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech labor market. It’s that they’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the pie. |
For too long, environmentalists have been viewed as self-righteous killjoys demanding that everyone overhaul their wasteful habits. It is time to change that. |
Pascal’s Wager, which says it’s better to believe in God just in case, is one of the most common arguments in favor of religion—too bad it’s illogical and trivializes both faith and reality. |
The essential facts remain: U.S. military outlays today equal that of every other nation on the planet combined, a situation without precedent in modern history. |
Fifty years ago, then-President Kennedy handed his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver an unwanted project called the Peace Corp. Shriver took the gift, and made it one of the most popular and endearing trademarks of that administration. |
Six are dead in Tucson, and the country is outraged. Sixteen are killed in Kabul, and there’s nary a thought for the deceased. Tom Engelhardt discusses how Americans are quick to protect their own, but care little for Afghan innocents. |
A diverse group of activists from both sides of the Canadian-U.S. border declares the Great Lakes a common endowment.
The girl is from the state where people use their hands to show where they live.
As long as Americans don’t grasp the connections between our war state and our “safety,” things will only get worse |
Join Guernica for an evening filled with food, drinks, music, readings, auctions, celebrities, honorees, and more fun than should be allowed at a benefit. |
Borrowing an idea from Colombia, Portland opens its streets to non-motorized traffic on Sunday celebrations.
In response to Nick Turse’s critique of his recent war documentary Restrepo, Hetherington fires back: “I think his opinion of what needs to be said about the war has clouded his viewing of the film.”
In St. Louis, Detroit, and Houston, new parks foster economic opportunities and prove that investing in public space is a boost on local budgets.
Bacevich, a former military officer, discusses the moment twenty years ago when he realized orthodoxy is a sham and how the education of that epiphany forced him to reexamine the rules of Washington.
The good guy prevented Bedford Falls from becoming Pottersville in the movie. But what would happen in today’s economy?
Informers have by now become our first line of defense in our battles with the evildoers. How expansive will the stage become for informers and their government directors now working the theater of the Great Recession?
The Senegalese Muslim vendor who first spotted the smoking SUV in Times Square and alerted police is no hero.
What are the connections between mental health and sociopolitical injustice?