Archive • Open Mode • Buttondown

Immediate appearances: thinking a bit about theoretical and/or analogical uses of the F word

February 7, 2026

Once again I’m typing to turn half thoughts (quarter? eighth?) into something closer to thoughts. I spent a while in the late 00s and early 2010s in left...

Against The Border Power

February 5, 2026

As I’ve mentioned a while back I wrote a letter to Little Village saying deportation as such is wrong, that we should think of it as something like slavery...

"This nightmare" - thinking about ICE and Minneapolis

February 3, 2026

I saw a short clip of an interview with Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz that encapsulates some worries I have. (I saw it on twitter and googling for it I found...

Liberal Egalitarianism and Object Permanence (Tooze v Anderson)

January 16, 2026

Hey there gang, I hope you’re maintaining despite the hellscape. I’m back with an offcut (even by my standards!)I don’t really follow Adam Tooze and haven’t...

lil more on Williams, agnotology, and abstraction

January 7, 2026

Operation: Read Raymond Williams is proceeding apace and I figured I’d write up some notes here on some more bits that struck me, and see if that shakes any...

Shocking cancellation/reading a novel

January 2, 2026

Hey there, happy new year to all who deserve it! (From my stupid blog to God’s ears, eh?) A couple three preliminaries. First off, go read this great article...

Moral injury, desk violence, social murder - bits and bobs of badness

December 7, 2025

Some things on my mind today that may or may not cohere. In no particular order... First, I was on the Death Panel podcast the other day talking about two...

fumbling to situate public health in capitalism theoretically and in time

November 14, 2025

Sorry to be back again and so soon (you do have my full sympathies, reader - I find my assigned task of writing this stuff bad enough, your assigned task of...

Thoughts on Riley; Gilbert and Williams (in which I go on too long even for me, because quantity is job number one)

November 12, 2025

This one’s a monster, just close the tab and walk away. Still here? Really? [Deep sigh] Okay. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you (and please do know that I am...

Speculations fumbling for a grasp of actually existing public health

November 9, 2025

As I’ve mentioned, I’m slowly (glacially, holy moly) reading around in the history of public health, mostly focused on the US. I’m doing this, obviously,...

Brief notes on Bristow’s American Pandemic plus my usual handwaving (social murder and memory-culture)

November 2, 2025

As an academic-leaning leftist/left-leaning academic who went to college in the late 90s and grad school in the mid 00s I had some formative experiences and...

further thoughts on recent rants

October 30, 2025

I was ranting on here the other day using Don Hamerquist’s discussion of ‘epistemological breaks’ as he uses the term (basically, people who inhabit forms of...

A letter on epistemological breaks, morality, and the current conjuncture

October 18, 2025

Dear comrades and fellow travelers, I wrote this to clarify my own thinking by the writing, and with the hope that it might spark a little conversation which...

Thoughts in response to Fairchild and Smillie

October 11, 2025

I continue to slowly make my way reading around in the history of public health (in the US mostly, at least so far), most recently Amy Fairchild’s book...

thoughts after reading Molina, Fit To Be Citizens

October 7, 2025

I just read Natalia Molina’s book Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940 (hereafter “Fit...?”) and had some thoughts I thought...

letter on deportations

September 29, 2025

hi all,I assume most of you don’t live in Iowa. (Is there life in Iowa? The world may never know.) As such you may not have heard the news about the...

Random thoughts re: sense perception, experience, Hartman's book, etc

September 25, 2025

Couple three quick thoughts, probly lowering the already low standard. Sorry/not sorry/deeply sorry as existential condition. First off, I'm interested in...