011: ✊🏻✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿

Basically
This week, a religion-based ban on Holocaust Memorial Day. Abortion funding cuts. Migrants restricted entry. Muslim Americans retained. The "wall" begun. And government science agencies quieted. This week belonged to a truly bad dude.

Verbatim

For New York Times Magazine, Jenna Wortham tells the story of last weekend’s March with a little more nuance. She begins with a photo of Angela Peoples (taken by Kevin Banatte) holding a sign: “Don’t Forget: White Women Voted for Trump.”

Those who were criticized for not participating reminded their followers of the suffrage movement, when black women were increasingly marginalized in the fight for the right to vote, and highlighted the lack of policing at the women’s march, a luxury never granted at Black Lives Matters demonstrations. And they reminded anyone who’d forgotten that 53 percent of all white women who voted voted for Trump, while 94 percent of black women voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton. They reminded people that it is very likely that the white women in the photograph probably know — or are related to — someone who voted for Trump. That photo cuts to a truth of the election: While black women show up for white women to advance causes that benefit entire movements, the reciprocity is rarely shown.

Orderly eggs, scrambled life.

Things

There’s a lot to process these days. Too much to take in piecemeal. With art, what one loses in factual detail one gains in overarching sentiment. And this visual tour through Detroit’s abandoned Packard Automotive Plant, set to a poem by Pulitzer-winner Philip Levine, extends beyond its subject to tell us what, exactly, is going on.

Architect and writer Keller Easterling (Extrastatecraft, 2014) spoke in Toronto this week on Special Economic Zones, the politics of infrastructure, and how to meaningfully interact with systems. She warns of how such "nested forms of sovereignty" muddle regulatory jurisdictions, engendering an “Esperanto of quality management" that stifles discourse. She speaks of global cities, but we can infer parallels to the corporate world, the walled gardens of the internet, or any “platform” that captures our imagination. Easterling encourages us—as architects, designers, and citizens—to use narrative as a means of resisting not only the individual bits, but the dispositional forms of such technocratic frameworks.

Disney built a “city of the future, built to look like the past,” super-rich doomsday survivalists won’t settle for bunkers and beans, and the White House breakfast buffet is freshly stocked with an elegant assortment of Lay’s and Doritos. Know the home, know the soul.

In the stuck-in-time quasi-state of Transnistria, politics have given way to apathy and dimly-lit memories.

For The Towner, Gillian Terzis takes on San Francisco’s naive new utopianism in the shadow of the Salesforce tower. “There seems to be a view of progress that defines it not as an ideological ethos, but as logical and inevitable outcome of ‘disruption’ and market upheaval. An overarching fetish for newness induces a kind of cultural amnesia, framing historical and cultural memory as an encumbrance that must be overthrown.”

We should probably just institute a standing obituary section here to mark the ceaseless passing of the thinkers we need most. This week we remember sociologist Zygmont Bauman, who died earlier this month at a respectable 91. Bauman, as this Guardian obit outlines, escaped Poland to fight the Nazis on the side of the Russians, and then bore close witness to the multitude of totalitarian horrors and purges that followed in Europe through the remainder of the century. His work, in total, was a warning against the terrible tragedy, not consigned to the past, that can be wrought by a poisonous mix of populism and inequality. He did not live to witness the final weeks of January, 2017.

Medical professionals band together to build the tool our society needs most right now: the Goopshit detector.