The history of free trade in Latin America must be understood as a history of violence: violence committed by the Global North against targeted governments in the form of coups, forcible underdevelopment, and wealth-sapping structural adjustment policies; violence against these countries’ self-sustaining rural economies and the livelihoods of their urban…

“There is no innocent eye,” writes Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art. “[It] always comes ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past.” According to this view, the eye is a compromised gatekeeper, one whose discernments reflect the particularities of the beholder and their social environment more than any…

*Includes spoilers for Pig (2021)* Truffles are symbiotic organisms. Embedded in the sunless soil, the truffle attaches itself to the roots of a tree and begins a process known as mycorrhiza. It provides the tree with soil-based nutrients which the roots cannot absorb without a fungal intermediary, while the truffle…

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism Chris Hedges, the great chronicler of American political, social, and economic decay, has described…