torture
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On ‘Chain-Gang All-Stars.’
I went to the jail last Sunday afternoon to host our weekly poetry class. A corrections officer escorted me to the fourth floor and then down a hallway toward the room that they let me use for classes. The officer and I had briefly chatted in the elevator, but after we reached the fourth floor,…
Adjei-Brenyah, book review, Chain Gang All Stars, Chain Gang All Stars review, Correction, crime, Department of Corrections, incarceration, isolation, jail, Juan Mendez, mass incarceration, mental health, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, poetry, prison, public safety, safety, seg, segregation, solitary, solitary confinement, teaching in jail, torture, Where Life Is Precious Life Is Precious
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On storytelling in games.
Of course games can be art! There are certain stories, like tales of moral complicity, that games tell better than any other form of media.
45, Abu Ghraib, atrocities, board game design, board games, Bruce Weigl, computer games, console games, Donald Trump, experiental art, fascism, fighting fascism, following orders, game design, games as art, Grand Theft Auto, Grand Theft Auto as art, GTA, Life on Mars, Marco Arnaudo, marcowargamer, Milgram Experiment, moral complicity, moral depravity, moral failure, multimedia art, narrative potential of games, politics, PotUS, psychology, psychology experiments, psychology experiments as role-playing games, Rockstar Games, Rockstar North, role playing, RPG, second person novels, Secret Hitler, Stanford Prison Experiment, storytelling in games, Storytelling in the Modern Board Game, The Soldier’s Brief Epistle, torture, torture in Grand Theft Auto, Tracy K Smith, Tracy Smith, Trump, war crimes
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On gerrymandering (a prequel).
The U.S. Senate was designed to subvert democracy and allow a political minority to perpetrate great evil. The system is still working.
congressional districts, democracy, districting, gerrymander, gerrymandering, how much does your vote matter, Michigan 14th district, minority control, murder, rape, representative government, Senate, slavery, stealing representation, suppressing voting rights, the Senate was designed to suppress the vote, torture, U.S. constitution, U.S. politics, U.S. Senate, United States politics, vote, voter suppression, voting, voting rights
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On Matthew Walker’s ‘Why We Sleep.’
We’re asking addicts to learn whole new ways of living … and expect them to do it while utterly sleep deprived in jail.
cocoffala, Communion of the Saints, enhanced interrogation, false confessions, heroin, incarceration, jail, jail poetry, learning, mass incarceration, Matthew Walker, Menachem Begin, methamphetamine, Monster House Press, opiates, Poems from the Jail Dorm, poetry, prison, prison poetry, probation, sleep, sleep deprivation, sleep deprived, sleep spindles, The Story of a Prisoner in Russia, torture, White Nights, why we sleep, William Booker
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On elephants.
We humans have treated elephants abysmally — not in spite of their magnificence, but because of it.
animal abuse, animal cognition, Animals Strike Curious Poses, broken families, Ciaran Berry, circus, dance, ecotourism, electricity, electrocuting an elephant, Elena Passarello, elephant brains, elephants, environmental destruction, exploitation, high school, hippocampus, Jumbo II, male role models, memory, post traumatic stress disorder, prom, PTSD, Ringling Brothers, tool use, torture, wayward youth
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On isolation.
When a government tortures people on *your* behalf, do you share the blame? If so, what should you do?
addiction, ADX, Bruce Alexander, cetacean communication, confinement, constitutional rights, deprivation tank, dolphin, dolphin communication, dolphin hand job, drug abuse, false confessions, Harry Harlow, Hell is a Very Small Place, innocent until proven guilty, isolation tank, Jeanne Theoharis, Jesse Wilson, John C. Lilly, Juan Mendez, laboratory animals, LSD, Margaret Howe, memory, morphine, opiates, Rat Park, Ray McGovern, Richard Feynman, sensory deprivation, social isolation, solitary, solitary confinement, solitary watch, stimulus deprivation, sunlight, supermax, Syed Fahad Hashmi, teaching dolphins to talk, terrorism, torture, Torture of a Student, Voices from Solitary Confinement
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On killer line breaks.
Tracy K. Smith’s poetry collection Life on Mars is excellent, combining bursts of science-fiction weirdness with totally non-speculative emotional clarity. If you chance upon a copy, you might try flipping to her poems “The Museum of Obselencence,” or “Sci-Fi,” or “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” particularly the fifth strophe of that last one; those are…
Frank Brown Cloud 