Five Essays

What I wrote this year

This year I’ve published a strange handful of essays. As the far right gain ground, my thinking on race, sexuality, culture, and narrative is increasingly concerned with the spaces and stories that remain politically contested, that are inhabited by reactionary forces but not yet ceded to their project. I’ve written about transphobia as an attack on public infrastructure, about how melodrama provides resources for left and right alike, and about how working class masculinities might escape or oppose the culture wars.

Inevitably, I’ve also been thinking about mass protest, the party form, and the warped temporality of political action. For Protean Magazine, I reviewed Hannah Proctor’s Burnout and Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn, trying to make sense of their shared use of fire as a metaphor. My essay, ‘In the Time of Ashes,’ is in Issue V: Contra Temps. It’s only in print, but I can send you a PDF if you drop me an email.

Finally, I became obsessed with scam centres, gated compounds where hundreds of thousands of workers are sending phishing messages, conducting fraudulent romances, and impersonating bank clerks, all under the threat of torture. I went to the Global Anti Scam Summit in Singapore to find out what tech and finance had to say about the system of mass indenture that is happening on their platforms.

More essays to come in 2025, and perhaps even a little book…