Will Meyer, with an eye to Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders and Todd Miller’s Empire of Borders, examines how U.S. policing and repressive tactics are exported to and tested in client states, and how they inevitably return home.
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All articles filed in Protean Magazine
Song of Freedom: #EndSARS and the Lekki Toll Gate Massacre
On the first anniversary of the massacre at Lekki Toll Gate, Okechi Okeke remembers Nigeria’s #EndSARS protests against police brutality, the violent government response, and the pain and inhumanity suffered by his family and so many others.
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Another Life is Possible
Isabelle Appleton on tradition as refuge from consumer society, the contradictions of the “trad,” and the joining of communal values and social conservatism in the Anabaptist sect of the Bruderhof.
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Towards Neo-Statism: Paolo Gerbaudo’s The Great Recoil
Samuel McIlhagga reviews Paolo Gerbaudo’s The Great Recoil, out from Verso Books. Gerbaudo’s book posits a shift to protective statism in response to amassing crises.
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Remote Work Incentives Are a Scam
In West Virginia and elsewhere, governments are offering up grants and tax incentives to attract well-paid remote workers and mitigate “rural brain drain.” This, writes Jake Maynard, is nothing more than another elitist trickle-down charade.
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Use Value
Poet Brendan Joyce’s “Use Value” conjures a nightmare future made in the image of Jeff Bezos’s most deranged fantasies: “a moon colony for overachieving / oligarchs.”
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Jamal Rashad and Richard Hamilton in Conversation
Poets Jamal Rashad and Richard Hamilton in conversation: on the latter’s debut collection, Rest of US (Recenter Press, 2021), on Black poetics, imperialism and revolt, “hard truths and struggle,” and the political poem.
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Class Dismissed
Reuben Dendinger reflects on the broken promises of an American academic career—burdensome loans, adjunct and contingent jobs, and the meritocratic myth.
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The Busch Family Brood
Devin Thomas O’Shea shares the saga of the scions of the Anheuser-Busch brewery empire: their arrogance, their self-mythologizing reality show, and the impunity afforded them for their crimes.
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Ten Years in Struggle: Occupy Wall Street and the Decade Since
Ten years on, Katie Myers reconnects with five members of Occupy D.C. and revisits its promise, its destruction, and the trials of intervening years. “We have to wonder when it’s all going to slip again, toward some next great cry out into the world.”
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