Weekly Reader

If he ever conceded so, Obama would likely insist nevertheless that the truth doesn’t matter nearly as much as maintaining faith in the American project. “I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America,” Obama writes in another excerpt published in The Atlantic, “not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind.” But he clearly understands, too, as Biden surely does on some level, that our situation is bleak. “I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide,” he writes. “In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish.” It’s a passage far less inspirational than it is chilling—evidence that as determinedly as he might disparage cynicism, Obama knows exactly what horrors await us in the years to come and that the curmudgeons and cranks on the left are, again, substantively correct about the trajectory we’re on.

But this collection and operationalization of biometric data — at the border, at the entrance to an office, on the floor of a warehouse — is not some neutral means for assessing the risk a given individual poses, with respect to Covid-19 or any other hazard, any more than biometric data in general simply represents the reality or perceived reality of someone’s identity. Such biometric forms of control replicate already existing biases about who must bear the brunt of surveillance technologies, marking out particular populations for more intensive scrutiny. This was true when concerns about terrorism after 9/11 led to the sorting of foreign workers, immigrants, asylum seekers, and noncitizens into “desirable” and “undesirable” categories, as David Lyon explains in Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life. It was also true with predictive-policing algorithms, which, as Ruha Benjamin and Simone Browne have intensively catalogued, were first deployed against Black populations.

The great myth that underpins policing in the United States is that it remains a purely local affair, with police responding to the safety needs of individual neighborhoods. Setting aside the numerous federal law enforcement agencies, the grants to municipalities from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and the nationwide professional and fraternal organizations that cops belong to, what unifies police in the United States today is their global reach. It is common today to hear criticisms of the militarization of US policing. But beneath this trend is a much-older process that has ebbed and flowed over time: the globalization of US policing.

Debs’s approach to the “popularity question” differs from one of his ideological heirs, Bernie Sanders. After languishing in minor party obscurity through the 1970s, Sanders dropped the most radical planks of his platform (including socializing the economy’s commanding heights) and gained political office by pursuing policies thwarted not by lack of popularity but by the plutocratic order. Often, his goal has been less to gainsay prevailing opinion — though he’s done plenty of that, too — than to press for public sentiment to be reflected in public policy. Popular social democratic reforms like taxing the rich, funding public programs, and boosting worker power are his bread and butter.

If your political aspirations are mainly about getting a seat at the table, these appointments may feel worth lauding. But they are in many ways symbolic gains, a point that even some of those who celebrate such symbolism can accept. Their takeaway is that girls will see these women in these jobs and realize “they can do that, too”—not that they will also have the means to do it or that it will necessarily improve many other women’s lives. It’s a regression to the kind of individualistic, girlboss feminism we have been trying to pull away from but that still has a powerful hold on those who posit a commitment to “gender equality” largely confined to who holds the power, not what they do with it.

Books Read In 2015

  1. The Battle for Justice in Palestine by Ali Abunimah
  2. The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi
  3. Jennifer Government by Max Barry
  4. Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature by Jorge Luis Borges
  5. Borges at Eighty: Conversations by Jorge Luis Borges
  6. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
  7. The Darkling Child: The Defenders of Shannara by Terry Brooks
  8. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex by Judith Butler
  9. Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler
  10. Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday by Italo Calvino
  11. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  12. You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost): A Memoir by Felicia Day
  13. Replay: The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan
  14. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
  15. The Peripheral by William Gibson
  16. Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira Grant
  17. Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema by Boaz Hagin
  18. The Odyssey by Homer
  19. A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
  20. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan
  21. Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs
  22. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse
  23. The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror by Arun Kundnani
  24. Passing by Nella Larsen
  25. The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
  26. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor
  27. The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the US-Iran Divide by Christopher Petherick
  28. The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov
  29. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 1 by James Roberts
  30. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 2 by James Roberts
  31. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 3 by James Roberts
  32. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 4 by James Roberts
  33. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 5 by James Roberts
  34. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 6 by James Roberts
  35. The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero
  36. The Oxford Shakespeare: Othello: The Moor of Venice (The Oxford Shakespeare) by William Shakespeare
  37. The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker
  38. Against Interpretation: And Other Essays by Susan Sontag
  39. Automate This: How Algorithms Took Over Our Markets, Our Jobs, and the World by Christopher Steiner
  40. The Epic Struggle for the Internet of Things by Bruce Sterling
  41. Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson
  42. The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women by Jessica Valenti
  43. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin