Urban/Global Politics

Okay, sorry I ever defended J-Lo over that Daily News cover story. Here she is with Marc celebrating the passage of the new “Ley de Incentivos Económicos para la Industria Fílmica de Puerto Rico,” an extension of an existing law that is apparently an attempt to make up for the loss of section 936 by allowing […]

This is one of the more inspiring pieces of oratory by a U.S.-based Puerto Rican politician I’ve ever seen. Most interesting is the battle set off by Resident Commissioner Pierliusi’s island-centric critique. The irony is that most of the island’s intelligentsia agrees with Gutiérrez–he even says in the video he’s far from the first person […]

This is quite a week for exposés. The most brilliant journalistic gambit of the year so far was pulled of by Buffalo Beast editor Ian Murphy when he taped a phone conversation with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker while pretending to be billionaire right-wing sugar daddy David Koch. During the conversation, he got Walker to admit […]

Twenty years ago Brazilian cantautor Caetano Veloso wrote a song called “Santa Clara, Padroeira de Televisao” in which he prays to Santa Clara, the Patron Saint of Television, that “Video be a pool where Narcissus/Shall be a god who will also know how to resurrect.” For many years, since the days that television transmitted images of […]

Last Friday, two days after his riot police force engaged in a “wilding” on University of Puerto Rico students, Puerto Rico governor Luis Fortuño addressed the mob gathering known as the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. While his embrace of basic Reagan principles is unremarkable on the surface, his repetition of the neo-Republican […]

The situation at the main campus of the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras continues to deteriorate. Today, during a “pintata,” or spontaneous demonstration by the students in which they painted slogans outside one of the libraries, the riot police force, which has been occupying the campus since December, began videotaping students involved in […]

While the U.S. media is currently slathered with tributes to Ronald Reagan, the father of worldwide economic ruin, modern right-wing conservatism, and the anti-intellectual fear-mongering demagogue, there is no mention of a far more heroic 20th century figure whose birthday is also today, February 6th. How many times, from the dawn of the Reagan era, […]

The New York Times’s willful sublimation of truth to its self-defining real estate interests is nothing new, but I guess as the “times” themselves become more transparently oppressive, the Times’s oblivious “objectivity” becomes more galling. Just published yesterday and accessible through a moderately visible link on the “New York-Region” page, the graphic above is headlined […]

When I landed at Luis Muñoz Marín Airport at around 9 PM on noche buena I got an email from a friend in New York that read: “The earth shook from Rincón to Fajardo on Christmas Eve in Puerto Rico. No casualties reported thus far. Happy Holiday.” It seemed like no one waiting at the […]

In this time when billionaire-philanthropists call for “radical transparency,” I think I sense an increasing need for anonymity as an antidote. At least that’s what I get from the above, one of hundreds, if not thousands of brilliant and funny art strategies created by Adál Maldonado. Perhaps most famous for having nurtured the idea of […]