Border Stories is a series of
short documentaries about life on the US-Mexican border, none longer than 6 minutes. The subjects are:
drug addicts on the border (warning: graphic images),
electronic music group Nortec Collective,
hospital costs of fence jumpers,
lonesome Minuteman,
Mexican emigrant safety patrolman,
ranchowners whose land is an immigration throughway,
US-raised 18 year-old sent back to Mexico,
virtual vigilantes,
two old men provide water in the desert,
dangers of journalism in Ciudad Juarez,
graveyard of US tires in Mexico,
drug ballads,
hardened border policy hurts cross-border community,
another cross-border community fears closing of footbridge,
working illegally in Laredo,
mayors of the two Laredos,
migrants' safe house,
hand-pulled ferry,
dentistry in Nuevo Progreso,
Brownsville high school teacher protests border fence,
golf course with the border on three sides &
fishermen on the mouth of the Rio Bravo. Border Stories also has a
blog about immigration issues.
posted by Kattullus
on May 21, 2009 -
18 comments
The American Hologram We suffer under a mass national hallucination. Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a “theater state.”
posted by idixon
on Apr 23, 2009 -
207 comments
Demon Denim. Feeding off a earlier
column in the WSJ by Daniel Akst, who wrote, "no fabric has ever been so insidiously effective at undermining national discipline," conservative columnist George Will takes up the (denim-free) banner in the crusade to rid America of "the plague of that ubiquitous fabric, which is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche."
posted by Liver
on Apr 16, 2009 -
158 comments
Richard Renaldi is doing some pretty wonderful photography. For several years, he’s been using a
large format 8x10 camera (with the hood and everything), profiling people in ways that feel both
intimate and
authentic.
His first book,
“Figure and Ground,” is a collection of portraits and landscapes that capture, with a quiet intensity, a diverse cross-section of the country.
His newest book,
“Fall River Boys,” is a sort of chronicle of a decaying American town, and the (mostly) young inhabitants who are either unable or unwilling to leave. (He and his partner even launched their own
press to get it published.)
[more inside]
posted by mapalm
on Apr 13, 2009 -
8 comments
Election Fraud in Kentucky. "I think this is the first documented case of election fraud in the U.S. using electronic voting machines (there have been lots of documented cases of errors and voting problems, but this one involves actual maliciousness)."
posted by chunking express
on Mar 24, 2009 -
36 comments
" ... the recession, particularly if it turns out to be as long and deep as many now fear, will accelerate the rise and fall of specific places within the U.S.—and reverse the fortunes of other cities and regions." From The Atlantic Online -
How the Crash Will Reshape America
posted by Afroblanco
on Feb 15, 2009 -
69 comments
"The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian Religion."
~
George Washington / "I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature."
~
Thomas Jefferson / "The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my religion."
~
Abraham Lincoln / "A just government has no need for the clergy or the church." ~
James Madison / "I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end... where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice." ~
John F. Kennedy / "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus --
and nonbelievers." ~
Barack Obama
posted by 0bvious
on Jan 20, 2009 -
270 comments
Ensuring that at least
someone gets his legacy right, Ex-President Bush has on his final day in office commissioned
a series of Official Legacy Booklets with such unlikely titles as
100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record. These weighty tomes inform us, for example, that "the Afghan economy has doubled since 2001"-- an accomplishment perhaps assisted by the arrival of American forces spending some $3 billion per month there.
[more inside]
posted by shii
on Jan 19, 2009 -
64 comments
In defense of
suburbs: "Revolutionary Road," based on Richard Yates's 1961 novel of the same name, is the latest entry in a long stream of art that portrays the American suburbs as the physical correlative to spiritual and mental death.
posted by kliuless
on Dec 29, 2008 -
172 comments
As forclosures rise, so do tent cities filled with Americans. Across the country, tent cities are rising everywhere. From
California, where foreclosures are taking over 60,000 homes per month, to
Vegas, where hungry children sleep in the glittered dust of the wealthy, to St. Petersburg, Florida where
the cops are destroying the tents of the homeless to make them leave the city, to the
suburbs,
homelessness, hunger, and
poverty are on the rise. The government's response?
Change how "homeless" is defined, so that the numbers appear to be decreasing at the same time that tents are springing up all over the country.
[more inside]
posted by dejah420
on Nov 7, 2008 -
135 comments
The Things He Carried. "Airport security in America is a sham—'security theater' designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease."
posted by chunking express
on Oct 16, 2008 -
91 comments
"Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China."
James Fallows on how the trade deficit between China and America works and what it means for the future.
posted by afu
on Sep 30, 2008 -
41 comments
