First Word #18
Reporting live from Wall Street!
I wanted to see what it would feel like. To cosplay as a journalist standing in front of the bright white light or snap a picture of a distressed looking man in a Patagonia vest.
The actual result was lacklustre. I saw a trapped bird in the subway station on my way to Wall Street. I had a cappuccino in this beautiful art deco building and dipped my biscuit in the foam. I sat and watched the traders roll in with the stoicism of soldiers, European tourists took pictures, and a woman stopped and chatted with the security guards on a dog walk. “She’s my fearless girl.”
I sat next to a father and his kid on one of the anti-terrorism rocks. At the clocked ticked closer to 9:30 he said something to the semblance of “these are the people who are ruining our lives.” I heard a man yelling a block away “acid and alcohol half off, drown your sorrows.”
“Join a union,” he added, it was unclear who he was speaking to, the traders or the onlookers.
Did you know that you can’t actually hear the bell from outside the stock exchange?
I had ~2,000 words of economic writing to do today unrelated to crisis at play. I’m supposed to get economist on the phone and ask them about the tariff and trade deficit numbers from two months ago and the jobs numbers from last month. Basically no one answered the phone and those did said we appear to be are living in a different world that one that appears in the estimates on the Bloomberg terminal.
When I finished I wrapped the day with a veggie Crunchwrap Supreme™️ at the Taco Bell across from the New York Times. Whirlpool in Iowa laid off about a third of their workforce today in accordance with the “current market,” its the largest firing from the state this year. I’m most interested in economic writing done by people who had a lot of McDonalds growing up and who feel a little rewarded right now for not being invested in literally a single stock. The Taco Bell played something called “happy videos” of babies falling asleep while eating and animals interrupting marriage proposals. The forecast shows a week of rain.
Enjoy these first sentences and come out to my birthday party on Saturday, we’ll party like the recession is in full swing.
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.
My Name is Mahmoud Khalil and I Am a Political Prisoner // Mahmoud Khalil // In These Times
You can also read Grant Miner’s personal writing here.
“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction.
Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived. // M. Gessen // The New York Times
Not exactly first words but I love how M. begins each graph of the piece with “It’s the…” over and over to demonstrate the repetition of the violence and how it is mirrors across police states.
In a room of artist vanessa german’s multimedia sculpture, figures emerge from the assemblage of bottles and beads, shoes and shiny things, porcelain tchotchkes and bird figurines, mirrors and watches, glitter, twine, keys, locks, painted stars, and astro turf. german makes what I’ve come to think of as sculptural collages or object poems with found objects and sourced materials.
Carrying Grief and Love at the Same Time with Artist vanessa german // Emily Alesandrini // AICA
From Francess.
Let’s play Imagine for a moment. Imagine the pressure is perfect. The brook is babbling. Your muscles are syrupy. Maybe a pearl of drool slides down your lips. Imagine, from your scapula to your hamstrings, as if by X-ray vision, this massage is delivering you somatic bliss. There’s just one thing: your masseuse is a robot. Dealbreaker?
I Got a Robot Massage and Things Got Metaphysical // Eloise King-Clements // Goop
Where have all the female edgelords gone? The modern-day equivalent to Andrea Dworkin can no longer be found in the pages of an obscure women’s journal or the paper of record. The manifesto has moved online. No need to write a whole book on the topic — she can just tweet a hot take.
Feminist Polemic Now! // Grace Byron // Lux
Grace with another banger, related to what I was writing about last week + Lux event tomorrow night, who wants to go!
CELESTE WALKER WAS PICKING UP HER KIDS from a friend’s when a neighbor called to tell her that her rental house, in an Atlanta suburb, was on fire.
Invisible Crisis // Michael Friedrich // The Baffler
There are situations in which tariffs are a useful tool to address a trade deficit, or to protect key sectors of a country’s economy. Then there are situations where you accuse a bunch of penguins on an uninhabited island of currency manipulation. Guess which one we’re living in?
The Trump Tariffs Are How Everything Works Now // Brian Barrett // WIRED