lil update and link dump
Greetings frenemies,
I hope you're getting what you deserve (you know what you are!). In addition, I thought I'd send you an Open Mode post, a fate no one deserves (take that however you like!). It's been an annoying time around my neck of the woods - broken laptop (and yet still too much email!), for one - but merely annoying so I can't rightly complain given the general hellscapeness of nearly everything.
I thought I'd do a quick link drop and brain dump here, on the thought that if you subscribe to my lil newsletter/blog thing you might want to know about what I'm writing and/or thinking. Contrariwise, if you don't want to know that then that probly tells you something about whether subscribing to my lil blog/newsletter thing is a good use of the remaining days left in your only life.
I wrote a short post for the LAWCHA blog pinging back and forth between thinking about the movie Matewan, which the Iowa Labor History Society just screened, the Iowa Labor History Society, and recent state attacks on Iowa history. That's here - https://lawcha.org/2025/09/15/save-our-history-matewan-memory/ - and includes links to the petition against the attack I mentioned.
I recently read a couple articles I liked a lot. One is William Paris's article making arguments about what makes critical theory critical in character. One element, he argues, is publicness. I like that point and it's been on my mind ever since. That article's here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article/52/2%20(155)/11/402176/What-Does-Critical-Theory-Have-to-Do-with-Self Another is this coauthored paper on the moral views of workers in Germany, views that are classed and critical, at least to some degree. It's interesting, check it out here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08969205251353116
I did a Bluesky thread thinking out loud about it, this link should open that even if you don't have a Bluesky account: https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile%2Fnhold.bsky.social%2Fpost%2F3lyypixhwad2o In addition to what I said there, I think the Marx quote re: latent forms of struggle is interesting and I think this likely connects generatively to Raymond Williams's discussions of emergent alternative and oppositional cultures. I think it might also be interestingly though depressingly linked to Irene Vega's recent Bordering on Indifference, based on Vega interviewing around 90 border cops. (It's a bleak book but very good.)
Finally, related to what I was saying the other day about the moral side of agnotology - moral forgetting, so to speak - I saw an abstract for a paper online that looks really great to me. It's here, abstract in English for a German language version of the paper - https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/dzph-2025-0016/html. As the first line of the abstract says, class "degrades human dignity" which means the harms of class can't be fixed by recognition, class must be abolished. (I wish I'd read this years ago! I tried to argue similarly but with less elegance in my article on labor history and Lochner v. New York earlier this year: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-labor-and-working-class-history/article/labor-history-and-class-violence-a-meditation-on-the-anniversary-of-lochner-v-new-york/A732309F4B31770EA5706F0FD16AA708) I'm told that German language paper will be coming out in English relatively soon in this edited volume, which will be open access: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5217-8/understanding-social-struggles/.
Keep on trucking,
Nate