“‘You came here because you’re one of the people who study these monarchs,’ she said. ‘You are exactly right. I spent the day doing a quick census up there.’ Quick, she thought, as in nine hours. Had he counted them all? ‘So, you do what, experiments, or observations? And write up what you find out?’ […]
“Here was church. An hour in the café, the slake of a tall cup of coffee, and stillness, and wearing shoes, a clean tile floor, time off for good behavior. A reminder that she could belong to something the size of this congregation, if they would have her. She was not outside the believer realm […]
“Bennett had headed up the National Endowment for the Humanities and then the Department of Education under Reagan. He had run both agencies as a proud moral scold. Which isn’t to say he was a prude. Bennett was an obese man, a chain-smoker, and, the country would learn years later, he had a pretty serious […]
“The new administration also wanted to do away with the Exclusionary Rule, override Miranda, abolish bail and parole, douse pot farms with herbicides, put far more focus on enforcement and far less on treatment, and, perhaps most radically of all, enlist the military in the war on drugs. The administration would focus most of these efforts […]
“Humboldt County, California, lies about two hundred miles north of San Francisco along the Pacific Coast. It is vast, mountainous, heavily forested, and sparsely populated country, home to a sizable portion of the state’s towering redwood trees. Over the last several decades, the county’s immensity, forest cover, and terrain have made it ideal for covert […]
“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era––the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, […]
“While as a nation we have mostly done a good job of keeping the military out of law enforcement, we’ve done a poor job, to borrow a bit of martial rhetoric, of guarding our flanks. The biggest threat to the Symbolic Third Amendment today comes from indirect militarization. Instead of allowing our soldiers to serve […]
“Once the mechanics of the shock doctrine are deeply and collectively understood, whole communities become harder to take by surprise, more difficult to confuse––shock resistant. The intensely violent brand of disaster capitalism that has dominated since September 11 emerged in part because lesser shocks––debt crises, currency crashes, the threat of being left behind ‘in history’––were […]
“Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however, disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival. Baghdad’s Green Zone is the starkest expression of this world order. […]
“When I was researching Ewen Cameron’s electroshock experiments in the 1950s, I came across an observation made by one of his colleagues, a psychiatrist named Fred Lowry. ‘The Freudians had developed all these subtle methods of peeling the onion to get at the heart of the problem,’ he said. ‘Cameron wanted to drill right through […]