I'm crowdsourcing a photo collection of all the COVID-19 closure signs that have popped up all over our communities. I'd love to include photos from your city!

[Hello MF, long time reader, first time poster!]

Over just a few days, my neighbourhood was blanketed in signs announcing closures and operational changes due to COVID-19. I was especially struck by the range of emotions in these signs — so many expressed messages of hope, optimism, and solidarity. I'm trying to document as many of these signs as possible before they disappear.


I'm also cross-posting photos on twitter and instagram

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It took a plague to slow me down enough to realize a years-held dream: posting a new video to youtube every day (almost) of me playing the guitar and singing a song. Been at it for a couple of weeks now and it's going pretty good! Covers so far include Lucinda Williams, Woody Guthrie, Doc Watson, and Steven Universe, plus a bunch by Trad of Itional, and I would describe the musical style as crude but heartfelt. Hope you enjoy!

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I worked with a group of young creative / technical folks (mostly POC) to create an emotional mapping site. Tag a location and share how you're feeling — and check out the three opportunities for funded creative 'residencies'.

A big inspiration was Queering the Map.

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I made a new website for my art practice, and, while my last show and newest work is textile-based, I thought MetaFilter might like my 2015 exhibition Screen Wall, featuring concrete breeze blocks I designed by (mis)using Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill.

I used Content-Aware Fill to create a large field of wonky-warpy screen wall block motifs and wrote a small PHP script to cut it into block-sized designs, which I traced in Illustrator and had water-jet cut from EVA, supplying both the mould materials and foam-rubber positives that visitors to the show could (and did) play with.

The show also included rubbings and photograms made using laser-cut bamboo tiles and an animation (strobe warning) consisting of 2000 image frames made using Audacity in place of an image editor.

Today the most of the blocks are in the gallery director's front yard (he also did the masonry), seen here, but I kept enough to make a rain barrel stand someday.

(Alternate secure link if that's an issue or if the domain isn't resolving for you yet)

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Each day, I post a Basho poem. These are my own translations.

Although Basho mostly keeps to the haiku form (5-7-5) I haven't kept that restriction. Some translations follow that form when possible. I do keep it to three lines and keep the rhythm haiku-like (short, long, short) with the 1st and 3rd often the same length. For each translation the goal is to find a balance. Translation, especially with poetry, is often seen as an impossible task. That is the case here. In that sense, these texts are not Basho but inspired by him.
The source is various Japanese sites but primarily this one: http://www2.yamanashi-ken.ac.jp/~itoyo/basho/
There are a number of Basho translations out there. Some are very literal while others are more daring. I admire the translations of Lucien Stryk.

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1993 was the most brutal of the post-collapse years in Moscow, and it was also the year I moved there without really knowing any better. I woke up in a society where few institutions functioned, mobsters in tracksuits flourished, and chewing gum was worth more than money. Red Ticket is my memoir about Russia after it lost the Cold War (remember when we used to say that?), and about social and personal collapse.

1. When Everything Is Easy- I move to Russia to make things harder.

2. Hussein | 3. Pay Stove - I meet the man who will save my life the next day. A mysterious woman gives me a gift.

4. Smokers' Paradise | 5. The Attack - I finally get to use the condoms. Things in the dorm take a dark turn.

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Identify each TV show by a single frame taken from their opening titles. All those years spent on the sofa watching mindless entertainment can finally pay off, if only in Internet glory.

I wrote this to give my friends (mostly longtime pub-quizzers) something to puzzle over. None of the shows are obscure (I tried to provide a healthy mixture of old and new shows) but this is harder than it seems.

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Service ribbons commemorate a soldier's participation in war, campaign or battle starting with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Ribbons are made of cloth and steel. This project is about creating them with HTML & CSS.

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A while back, I went looking for a TNG version of Deanna – not finding one, I obviously had to make one myself.

The last time I edited video was 1998.

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After two and a half years of work -- recording and editing some 300 hours of audio with dozens of actors -- I have started releasing the second season of my audio drama. Nineteen episodes (including a forthcoming seven part epic set between 1994 and 2023), 120 speaking roles, and I wrote nearly a thousand pages. The series involves parallel universes, wisecracking demons, revolutionaries, exuberant aliens fond of American nostalgia, and, above all, an examination of love and empathy.

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Bizarrely, and for reasons too long and dull to explain, I've released an album of odd rock guitar instrumentals under the pseudonym Trey Fontaine.

The main link is to the album on YouTube, as that seemed more democratic. it's on Spotify here, Apple Music here, and all the other streaming services, as far as I can tell, or at least that's what CD Baby says.

I'd actually forgotten it was coming out, or I'd have added it to Bandcamp, too, which I'll do as soon as I can, I don't have the time to create a new account and yada yada right now.

I wonder who's getting the money from those YouTube ads. I'm guessing it's not me.

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Inspired by this post my favorite pastime recently, when I'm feeling down or bored, has been getting GPT-2 to complete William Carlos Williams poems. I've made a tumblr where I have been posting some of my favorite completions of his classic, "This Is Just To Say."

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Fifteen Monsters All In A Row is a short text adventure/twine game (which should work in any browser), where you have to confront fifteen monsters (in a row), which I made for/with my five year old niece and two year old nephew, who designed the monsters, and wrote some of the stories. The game contains 15 monsters (all in a row), several secret monsters (occasionally in a row), multiple solutions to every problem (almost), some exciting stories (occasionally), at least two jokes, and even a super secret special ending.

A couple of years ago (this was designed in 2018, and made in 2019, and then bugfixed and released in 2020), my niece (then 5) and my nephew (who was 2), wanted to design a computer game, so we designed a computer game (the original design document can be seen if you click credits, then design document, on the opening page of the game file, and their original monster art and designs are the ones used in the game itself).

Then I spent so long getting round to actually making it that now she's 7, and he's 4, but it's finished now so here it is.

Fifteen Monsters All In A Row: Game
Fifteen Monsters All In A Row: Introduction/Explanation
Estimated Playthrough Time: 10 minutes
Estimated Replayability Factor: Infinite

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If you're bouncing off the walls, we have your antidote. Boast & Drive is a strategic card game for 2 to 6 players bringing to your living room the suspense and excitement of a squash match. Designed in Cleveland; made in the USA! Be the first to own the world's best (and only) squash card game. Every purchase includes a donation to a member program of Squash & Education Alliance.

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Salutations Everyone! We all have read the quotes about McLuhan, now hear and occasionally see him speak, it's quite different than just reading, as if the person, or medium, if you will, alters the content of what's expressed, or message, ya might say. Seriously though, I'm serializing a project entitled: "Western Cynical: McLuhan Unclaimed", it's available on YouTube, episode 13 is premiering very soon.

This project started off as a Story From Home, essentially the local television service would allocate some money for the purpose of creating original content. Initially, this was going to be a 25 minute video, specifically about Marshall McLuhan's attitudes about Winnipeg. The challenge soon began to be about finding audio or video examples of this subject, which was extremely elusive, since most had no idea he grew up in Winnipeg. Needless to type, the project expanded into a much larger on going habit since discussing the 'effects of technology' is an inelastic subject. Thanks for reading.

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An editor friend of mine and I have been trying to keep occupied during the lockdown by collaborating on short (sometimes very short) fiction based around reader-submitted photos. These are the tales we have so far.

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I recently came across some old abandoned police sketch software for Macintosh systems from the 1980s. I've wrapped it up in a web-based emulator and now you can play with it in your browser. Make your own face sketches.

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I set out to make the most mundane, dreary podcast possible... but then Stuff Happened that made it topical and perhaps slightly poignant. Each episode features the audio of a different person's journey to work, sometimes with just the background noises, sometimes with commentary.

I've got several more episodes recorded just before lockdown to release weekly, but will keep it going as long as I can find contributors (feel free to contact me on here or via @VOLEwtf on Twitter if you're interested, it's really easy to do).

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Four and a half years ago, I thought I was a cis man. Then I wrote a book.

Lucid is the tale of Jordan Parker (Parker to her friends), a trans girl who gets super powers and the body she's always wanted. As I wrote the book, I felt ever moment of her euphoria and getting to be herself. I felt her pain when she her true self was denied. Somewhere before I wrote that last line, I realized that I was trans.

I tried for a bit to get the book published, but that didn't go anywhere. A couple weeks ago I didn't want to leave Parker sitting on a shelf any more. She shows me who I am. She deservers better than that. So I started posting her novel online.

I hope some of you enjoy it.

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Two millennial caregivers for their chronically ill spouses, speak honestly about what life is like when there are more days spent in sickness than in health.

My friend and I have been working on this podcast for a few months now and just put out our first episode, where we talk about who we are and how we became caregivers. Its something I'm proud of, and I hope others like it too.

[Link]

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit DAVID GREENE, HOST: Yesterday, the Department of Justice reversed one of the most high-profile cases in the Mueller investigation. Michael Flynn served as President Trump's first national security adviser. He pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. Now, the DOJ is dropping its case against him, and let's talk this through with NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas. Hi, Ryan. RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning. GREENE: Feel like a lot has happened in the world since we last talked about Michael Flynn. Can you just remind us what his story is? LUCAS: Right. The FBI began investigating Flynn back in 2016 as part of the broader Russia investigation. FBI interview - FBI agents interviewed him at the White House in January of 2017, and in that interview, Flynn lied to them about conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador to the United States. A few weeks later, Flynn left the administration for allegedly lying to

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit NOEL KING, HOST: The U.S. and China have a complicated relationship - nothing new there. But during the coronavirus, it's getting worse and may even be at its lowest point since the Tiananmen Square crackdown more than 30 years ago. NPR's Michele Kelemen tells us what the diplomats have been saying, and it is not that diplomatic. MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: U.S. and Chinese officials have been trading barbs on Twitter. And when China's ambassador wrote an op-ed accusing the U.S. of playing the blame game, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo came back with this. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MIKE POMPEO: And I can't wait for my daily column in the China Daily news. KELEMEN: Beyond this tit for tat, relations seem to be deteriorating at all levels. The FBI, for example, has been warning universities about the dangers of working with China, especially in the scientific field. That was going on well before the pandemic, says Georgetown University's James

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: This country's top uniformed military officer is wrestling with a special problem of the pandemic. The military has to protect its people, but unlike schools and businesses, it can never shut down. MARK MILLEY: We still have to defend the nation and sail ships and fly planes and so on. How are we, as a military, going to operate in this environment and, if not this environment, some other pandemic environment? MARTIN: General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talked through the challenges with our co-host, Steve Inskeep. STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: General Milley is a four-decade veteran of U.S. operations around the world. He's also a history buff who knew we would play this interview today, May 8, the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. That war is on his mind as Milley considers the scale of the pandemic today. MILLEY: We, the United States, have lost over 70,000 killed in the last 90 to 120

As Minnesota Gov. Walz weighs his decision on when to let nonessential businesses reopen, he's facing a lot of pressure from a frustrated workforce, especially from small business owners who are trying to stay afloat during the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus outbreak. "The frustrations that they have are real. These are businesses that, they may have been in families for generations or they built up," the Democratic governor says in an interview with Morning Edition . The state is under a stay-at-home order until at least May 18 . In reopening the economy, he says, businesses will face another challenge: consumer confidence. Walz worries that — even with stay-at-home orders lifted — many consumers will be skittish about reengaging with businesses until they feel safe. Walz says many businesses should remain closed until the state ramps up its testing capacity. Achieving that goal will help contain the virus's spread, as well as bolster the public's confidence, he says.

Updated at 11:43 a.m. ET The Labor Department delivered a historically bad employment report Friday, showing 20.5 million jobs lost last month as the nation locked down against the coronavirus. The jobless rate soared to 14.7% — the highest level since the Great Depression. The highest monthly job loss before this was 2 million in 1945, as the nation began to demobilize after World War II. The worst monthly job loss during the Great Recession was 800,000 in March 2009. Loading... Don't see the graphic above? Click here. Unemployment was 4.4% in March as the coronavirus began to take hold in the U.S. It approached 25% during the Great Depression and remained elevated until World War II. Loading... Don't see the graphic above? Click here. The carnage was felt across industries in April. With most travel shut down, leisure and hospitality jobs fell by 7.6 million. The retail and health care sectors each dropped by 2.1 million. Manufacturing lost 1.3 million and government jobs fell by 980

Why is the government seeking to drop charges against Michael Flynn even though he pleaded guilty — in two admissions in court — to committing the crime at issue? The short answers: The Justice Department is giving him a break. And Flynn has played his cards well. The long answer: It's a long story. The deal Flynn admitted to lying to the FBI about conversations he had had with Russia's then-ambassador to the United States as he and the rest of President-elect Donald Trump's camp waited in the wings early in 2017. That case appeared clear. But the former Army lieutenant general also had been involved with other enterprises that might have resulted in more charges — including undisclosed foreign lobbying — and his deal with prosecutors swept that off the table. It also apparently avoided prospective charges for Flynn's son. Flynn and his attorneys considered the deal to be the least bad way out of the jam. "My guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the special counsel's office

Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET Democrats and some Republicans are considering ways for the federal government to get money into people's pockets while the coronavirus is keeping much of the economy on ice. Proposals for the next round of aid are being floated, and Democrats in the House are prepping another relief package as jobless claims continue to rise in the country. The Labor Department announced Friday that 20.5 million jobs were lost in April, pushing the overall unemployment rate to 14.7 %. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., hopes to release another bill, which is being crafted without the input of Republicans or the White House as early as next week. "This is a reflection of the needs of the American people," Pelosi said Thursday. "We have to start someplace and, rather than starting in a way that does not meet the needs of the American people, want to set a standard." The latest proposal from Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Ed Markey D-Mass., is a plan

The Supreme Court has temporarily put on hold the release of redacted grand jury material from the Russia investigation to a House panel. The Trump administration is trying to block the release. Last October, a district court judge ruled the Justice Department had to turn over the materials, which were blacked out, from former special counsel Robert Mueller's report into Russian interference in the 2016 election. An appeals court upheld the decision , but the Trump administration, hoping to keep the evidence secret, appealed to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts' order temporarily stops the process. Lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee have until May 18 to file their response to the Justice Department's attempts to keep the materials from the House panel. The Justice Department had until Monday to turn over the material following the appeals court order. But on Thursday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to block Congress from seeking it, saying, "The

Updated at 4:02 p.m. ET The White House on Friday confirmed a second case of coronavirus this week, now in Vice President Pence's office, as both the president and his No. 2 have recently begun traveling again. Pence spokeswoman Katie Miller tested positive for the virus on Friday, after having tested negative Thursday. President Trump told reporters Friday that Miller hasn't come into contact with him but has "spent some time" with the vice president. "She is a wonderful young woman, Katie," he said. "She tested very good for a long period of time. And then all of a sudden today she tested positive." "So, she tested positive out of the blue," he continued. "This is why the whole concept of tests aren't necessarily, right, the tests are perfect but something can happen between a test where it's good and then something happens and then all of a sudden, she was tested very recently and tested negative." The discovery caused Pence's departure to Iowa on Friday morning to be delayed by

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Adjusting to life on the virtual campaign trail has been a challenge for both Joe Biden and President Trump. It's been a particular struggle, though, for the former vice president. Here he is kicking off a virtual campaign rally this week with supporters in Florida. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JOE BIDEN: Just me? Am I on? UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yes. BIDEN: Good evening. Thanks so much for tuning in. KELLY: Ouch. Joining us now is NPR political correspondent Asma Khalid. She covers the Biden campaign. Hey, Asma. ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: Hi there. KELLY: So clearly some technical difficulties for the former vice president there. What is his strategy for campaigning when he can't go out and campaign? KHALID: Well, you're right. I mean, he's been hunkered down at his house in Delaware. So we should point out he has not been able to physically go out and campaign because of the virus. This week, the campaign announced this new

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Nurses and doctors have been at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. And yet even as health care workers fight back against the virus, the health care industry is crumbling around them. Today we learned that of the more than 20 million jobs that vanished last month, nearly 1 1/2 million were in health care. AILSA CHANG, HOST: And despite this dismal news for American workers, we heard a more optimistic message from the president today, who spoke about his belief that the country may soon turn an economic corner. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: So we're looking at the transition to greatness, and I think it's starting right now. CHANG: Meanwhile, the virus is inching closer and closer to the president, with another White House aide testing positive today for COVID-19. All right. To talk more about all of this, we're joined now by NPR chief economics correspondent Scott Horsley, science

Pennsylvania's governor wants to attempt a New Deal-inspired solution for getting the state's more than 1.7 million unemployed residents back to some semblance of regular work. This week, Democrat Tom Wolf announced a still-vague plan for a "Commonwealth Civilian Coronavirus Corps" which, he said, would ideally be a broad program to train workers to test for COVID-19 and conduct contact tracing to monitor infection rates, while simultaneously reducing unemployment. Wolf's spokeswoman, Lyndsay Kensinger, said it's no accident that the proposed program's name is reminiscent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Great Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps , which focused on the preservation of state parks and forests. "The governor will announce more details in the coming weeks, but the corps would be a 21st-century approach to historic programs like those in the New Deal," Kensinger said. Still unknown: When exactly the program would start, how many people the state might hire and

Attorneys for Rick Bright, the government scientist who said he had been reassigned and subsequently filed a whistleblower complaint , say a government watchdog agrees that he should be reinstated to his post. Bright was serving as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which is working on a vaccine to combat the coronavirus. He said he was ousted from the position last month because he wanted to spend money on safe and vetted treatments for COVID-19 — not on ones without "scientific merit," such as hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that President Trump and others had been touting. Trump on Wednesday called Bright "a disgruntled employee who's trying to help the Democrats win an election." Bright's attorneys say that the Office of Special Counsel, which hears whistleblower cases, determined there were "reasonable grounds" to believe that his removal was retaliatory and therefore prohibited. Bright's attorneys say OSC plans to contact the

The Census Bureau says it is continuing the gradual relaunch of limited field operations for the 2020 census next week in nine states where the coronavirus pandemic forced the hand-delivery of paper forms in rural areas to be suspended in mid-March. On May 13, some local census offices in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington are scheduled to restart that fieldwork, according to an updated schedule the bureau published on its website Friday. All workers are expected to be trained in CDC guidance in preventing the spread of COVID-19, and besides a new reusable face mask for every 10 days worked and a pair of gloves for each work day, the bureau has ordered 2 ounces of hand sanitizer for each census worker conducting field operations, the bureau tells NPR in an email. The announcement means more households that receive their mail at post office boxes or drop points are expected to find paper questionnaires left outside their

Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, answers questions about access to testing for COVID-19, false-negative results and the challenges of mass testing.

For the first time in its 231-year history, the Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments remotely by phone and made the audio available live. The new setup went off largely without difficulties, but produced some memorable moments, including one justice forgetting to unmute and an ill-timed bathroom break. Here are the top five can't-miss moments from this week's history-making oral arguments. A second week of arguments begin on Monday at 10 a.m. ET. Here's a rundown of the cases and how to listen. 1. Justice Clarence Thomas speaks ... a lot Supreme Court oral arguments are verbal jousting matches. The justices pepper the lawyers with questions, interrupting counsel repeatedly and sometimes even interrupting each other. Justice Clarence Thomas, who has sat on the bench for nearly 30 years, has made his dislike of the chaotic process well known, at one point not asking a question for a full decade. But with no line of sight, the telephone arguments have to be rigidly organized, and

President Trump wants states to begin relaxing stay-at-home orders and reopen businesses after the spread of the coronavirus pummeled the global economy and killed millions of jobs. The White House coronavirus task force released guidelines on April 16 to encourage state governors to adopt a phased approach to lifting restrictions across the country. Some states have moved ahead without meeting the criteria . The task force rejected a set of additional detailed draft recommendations for schools, restaurants, churches and mass transit systems from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it considered " overly prescriptive ." A number of states have already begun to lift restrictions, allowing for businesses including hair salons, diners and tattoo parlors to once again begin accepting customers. Health experts have warned that reopening too quickly could result in a potential rebound in cases. States are supposed to wait to begin lifting any restrictions until they have a 14

Dr. Grace Farris is chief of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai West in Manhattan. She also writes a monthly comics column in the Annals of Internal Medicine called "Dr Mom." You can find her on Instagram @coupdegracefarris . Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Protests over stay-at-home orders because of COVID-19 have become more common around the country. In California, a surprising group is behind some of them: those who oppose mandatory vaccinations. On Thursday, a mash-up of people mingled on the sidewalk in front of California's state Capitol in Sacramento. There were Trump supporters wearing MAGA hats and waving American flags. There were Christians, singing along to religious rock songs and raising their hands in prayer. The event's MC. urged Gov. Gavin Newsom to tune into their event. "Everybody up at the Capitol, tell Gavin Newsom [to tune in to] 107.9 FM, if he wants to hear what we have to say," the MC told the crowd over loudspeakers. "It could be kind of good for him!" There were also mothers with their children at the rally. Many people were not wearing face masks or observing social distancing protocols. They'd all come out to protest California's stay-at-home order, put in place to slow the spread of COVID-19. This week's

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

im losing my mind. there is no way you're going to be able to predict what this ad is trying to sell you

finally, now more than ever, women can buy our product

In the vein of Subway's bizarre ad from last year.

"Gold Bond Liqui-Shaq" (TV Sheriff Video Remix) [YouTube]

Dad: "Remind me again what you will do with a degree in conservation biology?"

Hello everyone! We're the Clark family. Colt (the Dad) is a professional musician and Aubree (me, the Mom behind the camera) is a photographer. Together we home school our three children (even when we're not in the middle of a pandemic). :) We're keeping busy during our time at home by

"The black feminist Combahee River Collective manifesto and E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie share the diagnosis that the wealthy and powerful will take every opportunity to hijack activist energies for their own ends."

On the origins of identity politics with black feminist activists:

The term "identity politics" was first popularized by the 1977 manifesto of the Combahee River Collective, an organization of black feminist activists. In a recent interview with the Root and in an op-ed at the Guardian, Barbara Smith, a founding member of the collective, addresses common misconceptions about the term. The manifesto, she explains, was written by black women claiming the right to set their own political agendas. They weren't establishing themselves as a moral aristocracy—they were building a political viewpoint out of common experience to work toward "common problems." As such, they were strongly in favor of diverse people working in coalition, an approach that for Smith was exemplified by the Bernie Sanders campaign's grassroots approach and its focus on social issues that people of many identities face, especially "basic needs of food, housing and healthcare." According to Smith, today's uses of the concept are often "very different than what we intended." "We absolutely did not mean that we would work with people who were only identical to ourselves," she insists. "We strongly believed in coalitions and working with people across various identities on common problems."

The concept of elite capture originated in the study of developing countries to describe the way socially advantaged people tend to gain control over financial benefits meant for everyone, especially foreign aid. But the concept has also been applied more generally to describe how political projects can be hijacked—in principle or in effect—by the well positioned and resourced, as Yang's "step up" demand exemplifies. The idea also helps to explain how public resources such as knowledge, attention, and values get distorted and distributed by our power structures. And it is precisely what stands between us and Smith's urgent vision of coalitional politics.

To better understand the broader dynamic, we can look to philosopher C. Thi Nguyen's work on games. As he explains in his new book Games: Agency as Art (2020), confusing the real world with the carefully incentivized structure of game worlds can lead to a phenomenon he calls "value capture," a process by which we begin with rich and subtle values, encounter simplified versions of them in social life, and then revise our values in the direction of simplicity. Nguyen is careful to point out that value capture doesn't require anyone's deliberate or calculated intervention, only an environment or incentive structure that encourages excess value clarity.

Nguyen stops short of noting that another risk of gamifying values is the unequal distribution of power across participants. But outside of the world of games, power differentials do shape outcomes. Value capture is managed by elites, on purpose or not. In other words, elites don't simply participate in our community; their decisions help to structure it, much in the way that game designers structure the world of games. After all, elites face a simpler version of oppression than non-elites do: whereas working-class black folk are pressed by racial slights and degradation alongside economic problems that might require "socialized medicine" to solve, elites's economic position makes them comfortable enough to focus on their own status and cultural power—often at the expense of non-elites.

The Congressional Black Caucus's cosponsorship of Ronald Reagan's 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act helped supercharge mass incarceration by establishing mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines and adding $1.7 billion toward the drug war while welfare programs were cut. This legislation solved the problem for the black elites of the CBC of how to seem involved with respect to the crack cocaine epidemic. But with the law's passage, working-class African Americans went from dealing with one very complex problem to weathering two interlocking ones: the drug epidemic itself—unsolved by this draconian measure—and the surge of discriminatory law enforcement the legislation unleashed.

Elite capture is not unique to black politics; it is a general feature of politics, anywhere and everywhere. I could just as easily have focused on the world of elite universities. In Philosophy of African American Studies (2015), for example, Stephen Ferguson II makes a similar argument about the elite capture of black studies, which owes its existence to the radical student movements of the 1960s and '70s but has since been "turned into a bureaucratic cog in the academic wheel controlled by administrators, with virtually no democratic input from students or the black working-class community." I could also have kept the general perspective but reversed the role of race and class. In socialist organizations, for example, we might find that white people likewise tend to capture the group's politics.

Or we could look away from race to a different set of identity characteristics altogether. In the Buzzfeed article "You Wanted Same-Sex Marriage? Now You Have Pete Buttigieg," Shannon Keating laments the trajectory of mainstream queer politics away from the more radical elements dramatically on display in the Stonewall riot of 1969 and ACT UP. Or take how The Wing, a coworking space touting itself as a "women's utopia," exploits the women who work for it.

And, of course, elite abuse of identity politics isn't limited to the United States. It is also a particularly salient problem in Global South politics, where national, ethnic, and caste identities are shaped by an unstable mix of indigenous and colonial history. Peace studies scholar Camilla Orjuela argues that, from Sri Lanka to Kenya, politics in multiethnic Global South societies easily fall into cycles of expecting elites to allocate resources along blatantly ethnic and regional lines. After all, the thinking going, the elites of every other ethnic group will do the same when they're in power. Journalist John Githongo describes such ethnic elites as "creatures of patronage and . . . influence peddling" who treat the state as a ladder to their own goals rather than an institution of collective responsibility. These conceptual strands are vividly illustrated by the history of the U.S.-backed Haitian dictators "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier. The Duvaliers cynically used tropes drawn from the Vodou religion, popular with the country's poor, to intimidate the citizenry while enriching themselves. At the same time, they unleashed unspeakable violence upon actual Vodou practitioners, fearing the revolutionary potential of the religion, which was instrumental in ending slavery on the island.

As the Combahee River Collective acknowledged, simply participating in activism is no guarantee that we will develop the right kind of political culture; its founding members were veterans of important radical political movements that nevertheless made crucial oversights along the way. Elites have to get involved—actually involved—but that involvement needs to resist elite capture of values and the gamification of political life.

We have our work cut out for us, but fortunately we aren't starting from scratch: there's a rich history to draw from. In the 1960s, feminists held regular group meetings, in houses and apartments, to discuss gender injustice in ways that would have been taboo in mixed company. A set of such "consciousness raising" guidelines by Barbara Smith and fellow activists Tia Cross, Freada Klein, and Beverly Smith provides an example of identity politics work as the Combahee River Collective envisioned it. The exercise starts by asking participants to examine their own shortcomings ("When did you first notice yourself treating people of color in a different way?"), but ends by asking how they can use an element of shared oppression as a bridge to unite people across difference ("In what ways can shared lesbian oppression be used to build connections between white women and women of color?"). Because, in the end, we're in it together—and, from the point of view of identity politics, that is the whole point.

"Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over." Sabrina Orah Mark reflects on fairy tales, the academic job market, and being a mother during the COVID-19 pandemic. (SLParisReview)

Kiss From A Rose, by Seal...by seals.