Category: On Human Rights
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X Marks the Name of The Father
What follows listens closely to a White House press conference, one year into the administration, January 2026. By the time a word bubbles up to the surface, it’s passed through several subterranean chambers. It arrives as a dream-image arrives—attached to innumerable associations—tangled with roots, not etymological, yet of a perdurable toughness. In our waking hours,…
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An Ontology of Equality
Orwell warned us that authoritarian governments flatten description and constrict vocabulary in order to maintain control. They repeat words, phrases, and slogans so incessantly that at last these become as familiar as our own voice, and we mistake their rhetoric for truth, and measure all things against it. What does not fit the familiar description…
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Field Note 2.2: Of ICE and Men
In this Field Note, I follow the ghostly echoes of California’s past — from Miwok and Chumash place names to masked raids by modern ICE agents. In a land shaped by snowmelt and migration, we ask: What happens when old names remain, but new dispossessions unfold? The rivers carry more than water. They carry tears.
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Field Note 2.1: The Wind Has No Papers
Not long after, we found ourselves witness to the tail end of the annual migration of California tortoiseshell butterflies, lifted upslope on Lassen’s invisible updrafts. Many had journeyed from northern Mexico and Baja California — without proper papers, their wings notwithstanding. And yet we do not call them “illegal.”
No Shortcuts to Now 