Mitchell Duneier’s Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea is not so much a full history of the ghetto as a place as it is an intellectual history of those who have studied it. Duneier profiles four black social scientists and community leaders who engaged with the physical spaces frequently […]

Read more

Photo Credit: Tristan Bowersox   Donald Trump keeps on upping the ante. Consider what he said at a rally last week in Fresno, on the subject of California’s apocalyptic drought. Make that “drought,” for according to Donald J. Trump, there isn’t one. Never mind that the years between late 2001 and 2014 have been the […]

Read more

Edel Rodríguez   David Cameron is the most unusual leader of any major power, due to his background, his unsuitability for his position, and his seeming success at it so far. Not only did he go to Eton and Oxford, but he may have, as was once written, “placed his non-parliamentary member inside the mouth of a […]

Read more

Edel Rodríguez   Donald Trump’s first tentative run for the presidency (1999–2000) ended almost as fast as it began. Video clips of interviews at the time reveal a progressive corporate executive, unlike the caricature Trump has devolved into. In excerpts from a February 24, 2000, interview with NBC News’s Matt Lauer, and an October 24, […]

Read more

Photo Credit: USGS   Architectural determinism has a strange effect: under its auspices, behavior is attributed to brick and mortar. Towers sow violence and destitution, either by creating irresistible opportunities for crime or structuring life in such a way that social contracts continually rupture. The argument is at once both a perverse scapegoating and a peculiar […]

Read more