“Narcissism, as a literary gesture, cannot be utterly new. But it does seem that the unmemorable work of other periods was bad in other ways: wooden, sententious, sentimental. The eye was not, I think, quite so explicitly trained on the self. This is not to say the cure for narcissism is the outward gaze. Social agenda, concerns outside the specific self, are not in themselves protection: one of the more appalling forms of narcissism is the appropriation or annexing of a real other (as opposed to pre-empting the role of the hypothetical other or confidante). Whole nations, whole torn civilizations turn out to be waiting to be given voice: what occurs, in such work, isn’t the poet seeing the world but rather the poet projecting himself outward so that he returns to the page, in costume and in multiple.”

“To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.”

“Around the world, large dam construction has displaced between forty and eighty million people over six decades, turning thousands of Indigenous and peasant communities into “dam refugees.” Dams are a potent symbol of capitalist development: towering emblems of modernization, a testament of mankind conquering and reshaping waterscapes, and a literal trickle-up—an uphill flow—to guarantee water benefits to the wealthy, while dispossessing those whose livelihoods rely on river ecologies.”

“Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes—the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons—and the elusive autumn aroma.”

Raymond Mattia’s family says that he called the authorities for help that night because of border-crossers on his property. The village, also known by its O’odham name, Ali Chuk, is less than a mile from the U.S.-Mexico line and about 140 miles, or a 2 ½ hour drive, southwest of Tucson.

“Raymond called for help and, in turn, was shot down on his doorstep,” his family said in a statement.

In an interview with The Arizona Republic, Annette Mattia, Raymond’s sister and neighbor, said she was on the phone with him just before the shooting occurred.

She reported that he calmly told her when agents arrived, “‘OK, I’ll go talk to them,’ and then two seconds later, that’s when I heard all the gunfire.”

Border Patrol officials and the union representing agents offered a completely different version. They said agents were only there because they were assisting a Tohono O’odham police officer responding to a call about shots fired during a possible domestic violence incident.

The account by the agents’ union says that Mattia threw a machete at the officers that landed a few feet away. That, though, is not what prompted the agents to fire. The agency said they fired moments later when Mattia suddenly extended his arm toward them.

“I’m not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance.”

MTV News Signs Off for Good After 36-Year Run

The brash media unit, which once defined music culture with correspondents like Kurt Loder, SuChin Pak, Tabitha Soren and Gideon Yago, is officially no more.

www.hollywoodreporter.com|Alex Weprin

Thirty-six years after MTV News was created to expand the stable of programming that defined the cable channel MTV, it is no more.

MTV News was shuttered this week as part of larger layoffs at parent company Paramount Global.

What launched as a single show in 1987 (The Week in Rock, led by correspondent Kurt Loder) eventually became a bona fide news outlet for Gen X and older millennials who found that traditional TV programming on the broadcast networks and CNN wasn’t cutting it.

Correspondents like Loder, Tabitha Soren, SuChin Pak, Gideon Yago, Alison Stewart and others covered music, pop culture, politics and other topics with an eye toward the younger generation that was tuned to MTV, rather than the network evening newscasts.

Along the way, MTV News created some pop culture moments itself, perhaps none more so than in 1994, when President Clinton appeared on MTV’s Enough Is Enough, a town hall addressing violence in America.

The special was led by Soren and Stewart and saw them, as well as audience members in attendance, asking questions of Clinton about fighting crime and balancing personal freedom with societal responsibility. But it was a section of lighter questions and answers that made national headlines, when an audience member asked Clinton, “Mr. President, the world’s dying to know, is it boxers or briefs?”

“Usually briefs. I can’t believe she did that,” Clinton responded, to laughter from the crowd.

MTV News subsequently held town halls with with Barack Obama, John McCain, Bill Gates and others, and boxers or briefs would become a running joke still referenced to this day.

Coverage of topics like sexual health, the Iraq War and devastating natural disasters earned the news division and its correspondents Emmys and Peabody Awards, while it continued to deliver news and criticism of music and pop culture.

On April 8, 1994, MTV broke into regular programming after it had confirmed the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, with Loder breaking the news to the channel’s viewers.

To be certain, the MTV News of 2023 was much smaller and far less high-profile than the MTV News of the 1990s and early 2000s, when it could help define pop culture and cover stories more traditional outlets wouldn’t touch.

MTV News was already significantly reduced in size back in 2017, when it largely abandoned a strategy to take on outlets like BuzzFeed and Vice with a team of digital journalists led by Grantland alum Dan Fierman. The company said at the time it would refocus on shortform content and video in a return to its roots (MTV News used to have interstitials at the top of the hour on the cable channel with news updates). The most recent iteration focused on entertainment and pop culture news and criticism.

If you think decent homes for all is an impossible dream, take a look at Vienna

In contrast to Britain, most people in the city live in good quality, subsidised housing

www.theguardian.com

Poorly designed, shoddily built council housing is, however, a political choice, not the inevitable consequence of state management. The original conception of social housing was to provide the kind of homes that appealed across classes, to create communities in which “the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street”, as health and housing minister, Nye Bevan, put it in 1949, describing his vision of the new municipally owned housing estates.

Political reality killed such aspiration. Council houses came to be built cheaply and became marked by social stigma, the repositories of the poor and the deprived. From Ronan Point to Grenfell Tower, social housing was not just tawdry but often dangerous, too.

“The phrase ‘council estate’,” Lynsey Hanley writes in Estates, her history of council housing, “is a kind of psycho-social bruise: everyone winces when they hear it.” “It makes us think of dead ends (in terms of lives as well as roads),” Hanley adds, and “of bad design, identical front doors, windswept grass verges, and the kind of misplaced optimism which, in Britain especially, gives the individualistically inclined an easy way to kick social-democratic values.” Little wonder that by 1979 so many council tenants were eager to seize the chance to become owner occupiers.

The abandonment of social housing for a policy of home ownership and of trusting in market forces has not, however, provided most working-class people with greater control of their lives. There has been a decline in house building since the 1970s. As house prices have soared while wages have stagnated, so home ownership has moved beyond the reach of more and more people. In the early 1990s, the average house cost around four times the average wage. By the end of last year, it cost nine times the average wage.

[…]

What good housing requires, as Vienna shows, is political vision and will. The real question is not: why shouldn’t working-class people own their own homes? It should rather be: why should we not all have proper, decent housing? That costs money, and higher taxation. But it is not nearly as utopian as many imagine.