Invisible Man & Famine

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The Invisible Man

Esquire • 14 Nov 2024 • ~8300 words • Archive Link

We see right through the unshowered soul living in a car by the beach, or by the Walmart, or by the side of the road. But he’s there, and he used to be somebody. He still is. A firsthand account of homelessness in America.

I sleep at Walmart that night, but the police will continue to come as if I’m some kind of one-man crime wave.

Engineers of Calamity

Boston Review • 14 Nov 2024 • ~6200 words • Archive Link

Famine denial’s past and present, from Ukraine to Gaza.

In the gray zone of collective starvation, people inflict unspeakable cruelties on their kith and kin to survive. It is societal torture, turning the biological survival instinct against the bonds of social solidarity. This is one of the enduring themes in histories of the Great Hunger in Ireland, and is increasingly surfacing in studies of how famines are remembered elsewhere. If we train the focus of our lens on the community, what we see are the harms that a society inflicts upon itself. We see the subaltern thieves, exploiters, and opportunists, the carpetbaggers and mealmongers, and those who target their deprivation on some in order to protect others, all while remaining part of a cruel apparatus of power. What the victims don’t see are the distant engineers of this calamity, guiding the self-immolation from a distance—with intent or with reckless, racist indifference to human life. And the engineers themselves deploy a range of techniques to conceal or mislead the world about their crimes: what we can call famine denialism.

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Schools vs. Screens

Macleans.ca • 12 Nov 2024 • ~4600 words • Archive Link

This fall, provinces from coast to coast confidently announced that they were banning phones in the classroom. It’s not going well.

So what is separating schools that have gone phone-free from those still infested with distracting devices? A handful of key factors have jumped out of my conversations with teachers and students: support from parents; funding for schools to buy their own electronics; and how willing teachers and administrators are to physically separate kids from their devices, not just leave them buzzing in their pockets. But the biggest factor, I heard over and over, is buy-in from the top. The fate of phone restrictions will depend primarily on whether or not principals and superintendents can establish clear rules, stand up for teachers who enforce them, hold firm against parents who object, and create clear and enforceable boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate use. Adam, though, says that his administrators are kowtowing to helicopter parents, tolerating illicit device use and depriving teachers of enforcement power. The higher-ups have decided that insulating themselves from risk—a broken iPhone, an irate parent—is more important than students’ education.