The Hip Hop Anthropologist

The unions voted overwhelmingly for this nut. Don't believe the hype or what their leadership is saying. You can hear the hollow echo of their paid endorsements bouncing off the walls of deserted factories across the rust belt, but the membership, the actual men and women with dirt under their fingernails and bills in their hands, they pulled the lever for him anyway. It’s a spectacular, nauseating display of manufactured consent masking genuine, deep-seated economic anxiety that was cynically exploited and then thoroughly betrayed. The leadership puts out statements about job protection and collective bargaining, yet their collective endorsement was nothing more than political stagecraft, a rubber stamp on a strategy of self-destruction. The rank and file fell for the spectacle, the bombast, the sheer, theatrical lie of the strongman act, and now the entire working class is left holding the empty bag, wondering where the hell the promised boom went. The man never built anything. T...

  I used to think social anxiety was a private wiring, something that lived inside a person and only occasionally flared in crowded rooms. Then I began to watch people I know—friends, younger cousins, former students—change shape under the pressure of life lived online. Their stories are not clinical case notes but small, living proofs of how connectivity can manufacture isolation. Miriam: The Curated Self Miriam built a life in public. Her feed was meticulous: staged mornings, witty captions, carefully edited triumphs. Off‑camera she was frayed. I remember sitting across from her at a café as she scrolled through her own hour‑old post and counted likes with the intensity of someone auditing their pulse. She described conversations that never happened because she had rehearsed them for an audience instead of a single listener. Her anxiety came from the mismatch between an exhausting, performative visibility and the quiet absence of true intimacy. She was visible to thousands and al...