Hey there gang - I was thinking to myself ‘I haven’t written anything for my lil blog in a while, I bet people are relieved, it’s been like, what, a month?’ so I checked and it had been longer than a month but I knew I had written something more recently so I checked and it turns out I had left this in the drafts here instead of hitting send. I still fuck up simple things because I’m still punk, right? Right? Hello? (Speaking of punk, right now my 8 year old is in the kitchen shouting her head off singing along to that one Hole song with the refrain “go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to!” and I have to say, I really should listen to more Hole, they’re good, and, even more so, experiencing my kids being transported by music is just the best fucking thing in the whole fucking world, no contest.) Anyhow, my stupid post from earlier in this stupid summer is below to clutter your inbox and besmirch (?) your browser. I’ve got a couple more book reviews and whatnot out places, as those come out I’ll share them here. I hope to eventually have more thoughts again. At the moment I’m kinda buried with work stuff, some of it cool - I’m teaching two brand new courses, one of them a seminar on Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish; those are a ton of work but enjoyable - and some of it, well, let’s just say very, very not cool - and with family and life stuff, again some of it very cool (the 8 year old is about to start her third acting class at the local drama place, which is so fun) and some of it a bunch of stupid bullshit downstream from being underpaid for my whole fucking life (I’m gonna be replacing yet another faucet yet again, for instance). Once time for thinking thoughts worth pursuing returns to my life I’ll get back to polluting your information environment, and yes, that’s a threat. (Ha.)

Okay that’s enough of that. Enjoy the month old post below. Or don’t. I’m not judgmental. (I am actually.)

Later haters,
Nate

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What’s happening, good people? (No for real. What the fuck is going on?! Can someone wake me up? Please I’m begging you....)

I wrote a rambly self-indulgent draft of a post then decided it would test your patience so I went back to the word-mines to dig out a new version. (Believe it or not the last draft was even worse.) Now, you might think ‘but isn’t patience-testing rambly self-indulgence job number one over there at Open Mode Industries, LLC?’ and you’d be right but it’s kind of a point of pride that I’ve never been that good at doing jobs. ‘You’re not the boss of me!’ I shout once again in my mind, this time at my own self....
So here’s the condensed version, numbered to help me organize my thoughts.

1. I can’t recall if I mentioned this before, in case not: I wrote a short essay reflecting on my article “The Work of Forgetting.” It’s up at LaborOnline, who kindly ran it, for which I’m grateful, here: https://lawcha.org/2026/06/13/the-work-of-forgetting/

2. I’ve got book reviews out under consideration for Jonas Marvin’s new book The Breaking of the English Working Class and Lorenzo Feltrin’s Workers and the World. They’re both very good, get them! Both are published by Verso, you know how to google. Both books are at least in part depicting processes of social murder, though neither uses the term, and the Feltrin is more directly so. If you’re reading this then you must like sadness and sufferation, but you also deserve good things too so go get this pair of good books about our sad, suffering world. If the reviews end up coming out, and I assume they will, you will hear about them from me here since here at Open Mode self-promotion is job number one, and you know me, I’m good at doing jobs, for me that’s kind of a point of pride!

I’ve also got a review coming out eventually of David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz’s recent-ish book Building the Worlds that Kill Us, which is a single volume history of the United States told from a perspective that centers on the social determinants of health in an expansive sense of the term. As I argue in the review, it’s good, about as good as work of history can be without being Marxist. I talk a bit more about that in the review, which I will mention again when it comes out, and I want to stress that I think the book is definitely worth a read including to us Marxists. I think it’s something we could do something with, run with the ball kinda thing.

3a. I recently had an essay come out at the LPE Blog, speaking against some things Sam Moyn has written about the virtues of mandatory retirement. There’s also a response to Moyn by Gabe Winant, here: https://lpeproject.org/blog/cradle-to-the-grave/ Mine’s here: https://lpeproject.org/blog/what-rolls-downhill/. Gabe’s is smarter, mine’s angrier, so take your pick depending on what kind of punk you are and just know that whatever you pick, the rest of us, being punk, are judging you, you punk.

3b. I have mixed feelings about my essay (I’m told there are feelings that are not mixed; all of mine are. The exact recipes are proprietary. Get your own emotional cocktails, punk, these are mine! And I assure you, they all taste terrible!) Partly I don’t feel like I managed to think much in the way of new to me thoughts in the writing, which is by far the main reason I like to write. Well, I like having written. To write is to suffer. To have written is, umm, some good thing that is not suffering. I’m told there are such things. Sleep, I guess? Petting a purring cat is pretty good too. That said - not the purring cat part, the tedious part before about my feelings about my essay - I did come away from my essay wanting a better theoretical grasp of age as a social category, so in that sense it was generative. I wrote up some notes elsewhere on the subject then wondered if I’d missed the boat. I’m going to percolate on that and might write it up more fully later.

3c. For now very briefly and perhaps overly compressed: I think age and disability are real and are closely related phenomena that have a great deal to do with how nature and biological life are always-already socially mediated (we never really encounter nature and/or humanity per se, we always encounter a time and place specific human-society-organized instance of nature and/or humanity - Soren Mau’s book Mute Compulsion is very good on the human part of this - and if there are exceptions to this then they’re rare enough that we can ignore them for the sake of analysis). That is, age and disability are of class society, are very closely related in that to be very young or very old is in effect to be impaired and also quite often to be consigned to the social position of disabledness.

This is often not what people mean to talk about when they talk about age in political circles, yet those ways of talking often have ramifications (often bad ones!) for those social processes. I think what people often mean to talk about are patterns of historical experience and wealth accrual (or not) over time - this generation had it good, that one had it bad, this one has resources now and that one doesn’t, etc. I also think age-talk - again like and significantly overlapping with, disability talk - often serves as a way of rendering some people morally removed thus subject to acting upon with relative impunity and (falsely, merely apparently) clean conscience.

This is closely related to what I get into in my essay at LaborOnline and related academic article: age-talk and disability-talk are often products of and resources for what I in those pieces call “work of forgetting.” I also get the impression that we are right now in 2026 seeing an intensification of various processes of social murder tied to areas of social life and I suspect that talk about age and disability - I mean specifically the kinds that circulate and are propagated by forces within the dominant culture - is perhaps becoming more widespread and hateful in response to that intensification and such talk very likely is a way to talk around or away from that intensification of social murder. There is here a set of intellectual issues I find very compelling, basically what would a cultural materialist/Raymond Williams-ist account of the interaction between social murder and culture in capitalist societies look like, and this is also all tied to truly heinous acts committed by some people against others so the human stakes are very high, it seems to me, and so it also feels a little gross to be intellectually excited here. That’s the gist, such as it is. More later if I have a thought on it later, I dunno if I will. (I am feeling kinda tapped out lately - again! still! - from life and job stuff and being tapped out always feels like there will never again be thoughts in my head.)

4. I’m working on revising an essay that is partly on British socialist humanism which Open Mode completionists will know is a longstanding (though rendered a bit off-again on-again because of other obligations) interest of mine and which I believe has a reasonable chance of eventually seeing the light of day. Here too, I’ll let you know but wanted to flag it up because, well, I don’t exactly know because why. Hmm. Anyway.

5. My buddy October (https://octoberk.com/) has put together a book called The Struggle Is Always Worth It which I want to flag up for you. I have a chapter in it but I assure you the book will be good anyway. I would consider it a personal favor if you would pre-order it via this link https://givebutter.com/SIAWI-presale because October is very cool and hardworking and is doing this project as a self-produced DIY kind of a thing, very punk and worthwhile and like many things of that nature it is under-resourced so your support matters if you can swing it. Check out October’s other work too, at the link above, it’s good!!

6. There are two other good books I wanted to put on your radar by people I like a lot. One is Mothering for Capital by Maria Kromidas - https://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/9780826500564/mothering-for-capital/ - coming out soon and the other is Motivations for Refusal by Mark Gawne which came out last year and I believe I have been remiss in not mentioning previously - https://brill.com/display/title/72189 I’ve read both and they’re good (I hope it’s not unseemly or otherwise inappropriate for me to say, I was a reader on both books in manuscript form). Check them out and if you’re in a situation to buy them, request them for a library, or both, please do so, again I’d consider that a personal favor.

I think that’s everything but I’ll probly remember another thing as soon as I post this. Ah well. For now anyway, that’s the stuff I can recall wanting to tell you about and now I have told you about it so I will stop here.

Keep on trucking everybody. I realize the bastards are grinding us all down, I hope you escape the gears sometimes and get to rest, relax, rejuvenate. I’ll catch you when I catch you. Cheers!