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jonah walters@jonahwalters.bsky.social |
116 followers 96 following 77 posts
postdoc at UCLA studying in-custody death and “less-than-lethal” weapons. also freelance writer. jonahisaac at gmail dot com
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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“Anthracite is a martial resource. It has always proposed, from the earliest moments of its exploitation, to assist in the conduct of violence.”
on carbon, Moravians, the long-barreled musket, and growing up in the Pennsylvania coal region during the “war on terror,” in LARB!
📗🗃️🧪🏺 #sts #geosky
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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(as always, if you’d like to read the paper but you’re unable to access it, just send me an email! i’ll be happy to share. jonahisaac at gmail dot com)
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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my new paper with Terence Keel, in which we chart the political and epistemological history of pepper spray, from colonial encounter to chattel slavery to professional policing.
the story raises some unsettling questions about race, science, and violence in the US!
🧪🏺#STS #philsci #histsci #geosky
2 replies 15 reposts 27 likes
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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read the preface to THE GOOD DIE YOUNG, our new book-length anti-obituary for Henry Kissinger, published by Jacobin and Verso and edited by Bhaskar Sunkara, René Rojas, and me! “By showing Kissinger to be part and parcel of US expansionism, we hope to muster a moral critique of US foreign policy.”
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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thank u!
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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hi! would love to be added to the contributors list! Here’s my academic profile - socgen.ucla.edu/people/jonah...
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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love this, thank u, will absolutely join!
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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this is really interesting, would be eager to learn more about this!!
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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yeah this hypothesis seems on the money to me, especially since in a number of cases (like the Egyptian cereal cults!) any agricultural “surplus” was regarded as an essentially mystical object, with crop yields often ceremonially destroyed or held in ritual storage for deities/the deceased
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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here’s the preface to our little Kissinger book!! I hope you’ll read it
what a thrill (and a testament to the global reach of jacobin!!) that it has already been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, maybe other languages too, and re-published around the world.
jacobin.com/2023/11/henr...
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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a huge and heartfelt thank you not only to all our contributors, but also to the others who made this project possible!! and a special thank you to the great Marilyn Young, who died during the preparation of the manuscript. as we write here, her fingerprints all over the finished book.
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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super duper proud that this project has finally come to fruition. it was an honor (and an education!) to co-edit this volume, which is full of perceptive and uncompromising essays by some of the best scholars in the world.
buy it at jacobin.com!
1 replies 2 reposts 6 likes
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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the chapter on Kissinger and Ellsberg in this is excellent
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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truly the most exciting field in the world
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Cat 🇵🇸
@cgold.bsky.social
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International Critical Geographies Group statement on the genocide in Palestine, for signatures & circulation 🇵🇸
#Geo #AcademicSky #PhDSky
2 replies 3 reposts 8 likes
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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can’t believe i let veterans day pass without posting my annual appeal to geographers, geography students, and GIS professionals to be more proactive about our discipline’s dangerously symbiotic relationship with the U.S armed forces! (not historically! in 2023!!) #geosky
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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swelling with pride in my city and my friends. no to genocide in Gaza and free free palestine!!! from the river to the sea!
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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i wrote about the tragedy of Tim O’Brien, who is arguably our country’s most unflinching anti-war writer, and how deeply disappointed i am in him, for the jacobin literary supplement (was it uncomfortable to review a book i kinda hate by an author i really love? oh you-betcha it was!!)
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Alex Press
@alexnpress.bsky.social
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there are now more than 1,900 signatures. thanks, everyone!
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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in awful news for my cohabitator, i have begun to acquire Vollmann books
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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it’s true what everybody is saying: this is just an extraordinary piece of writing. it’s enough to make a guy spend the next decade of his life becoming a William T. Vollmann completist!! harpers.org/archive/2023...
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Jake Romm
@jakeromm.bsky.social
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Gaza has gone dark
The team at @palestinestudies.bsky.social has been translating & publishing messages from Gazans as they come in—which we at @proteanmag.com will be republishing here as well, so the world can hear from the people that Israel is trying to extinguish
proteanmag.com/2023/10/15/l...
2 replies 192 reposts 288 likes
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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that’s so awful, im sick and outraged for your student. i hope she’s ok. I’ve heard similar stories from others at UCLA
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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if you’re so moved, you can add your signature at this link: cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/for...
#academicsky
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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i had the same problem! try this link: cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/for...
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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you can read the full open letter here.
if you are a student, alum, faculty member, staff member, or have any other affiliation with any University of California campus, please consider adding your name. cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/...
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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im proud to join numerous friends, colleagues, and mentors across the University of California system in signing this statement unequivocally opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
shame on those who’ve tried to intimidate our Palestinian students into silence. no to war, no to genocide. #academicsky
2 replies 3 reposts 12 likes
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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read more about this in my piece for The Jersey Vindicator!
most jails have utterly failed to self-report adequate information about solitary, nearly all jails still use solitary against young people, and in some jails the overall rate of solitary is *higher* than in state prisons
t.co/48DZh8aepx
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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this is… not how things are supposed to be. the law explicitly prohibits the solitary confinement of people 21 and younger, except in rare circumstances. but in one county, 21 and unders account for a full 57% (!) of all solitary commitments. (officials there told me this is perfectly legal. hmm...)
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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county jails—where about 44% of New Jersey’s prisoners locked up—don’t follow the laws on solitary confinement either!
one reason this matters is that jail populations skew younger than prison pops. we estimate that 11+ percent of jail prisoners held in solitary are 21 or younger. t.co/48DZh8aepx
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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today the corrections ombudsman in New Jersey released a report documenting the continued use of solitary confinement in state prisons, contrary to the 2019 Isolated Confinement Restriction Act. im glad to see the ombudsman is paying attention, but the report leaves out half the story—county jails!
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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excited to see that The Jersey Vindicator, a promising new outlet for investigative reporting in New Jersey, launched today! very flattered that the first investigation they published is my dig into county jails and their failure to implement a historic 2019 law limiting solitary confinement
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Taniel
@taniel.bsky.social
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A DA took office in PA in 2021 to fill vacancy, & quickly made his county an outlying epicenter of seeking death penalty. A window into him as he runs for a full term, & into how death cases are all about geography. Critical new reporting by Lauren Gill:
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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here’s a direct link to the report “In-Custody Deaths in Ten Maryland Detention Centers, 2008-2019” (BioCritical Studies Lab, August 2023)
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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🏺
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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can anyone recommend good critiques of Chris Knight…? ty in advance!!! (im talking the early human sex & menstruation stuff, not necessarily the metatheoretical linguistics stuff (I don’t know how many times i have to tell you people!! im too dumb for linguistics and that will never change!!))
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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the panel’s title was a reference to a pop song from 1991! a professor famous only for mishandling human remains was slated to give a talk entitled “No Bones About It”! these are simply not serious people and this was never a serious endeavor
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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tempest in a teapot, etc, but some enterprising journalist should ask the presenters who were slated to be on that dumb AAA panel to share their prepared remarks! seems obvious that they never actually intended for the panel to go forward. this was cancel-bait from the jump. so call their bluff!
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M. E. O'Brien
@genderhorizon.bsky.social
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My dear comrade Madeline Lane-McKinley wrote this deeply moving review of my recent book.
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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here’s a direct link to the report “In-Custody Deaths in Ten Maryland Detention Centers, 2008-2019” (BioCritical Studies Lab, August 2023)
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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so very proud to share this Washington Post article, which highlights a recent study of jail deaths in Maryland that i was lucky enough to contribute to. Working together with local community leaders, we used public data to document some deeply troubling patterns in 10 Maryland detention centers.
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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it’s occurring to me now that I should also recommend the 2019 book-length essay “Dad’s Maybe Book,” from 2019. it’s easy to overlook, maybe bc of the title, but it’s extraordinary. and it’s O’Brien’s only work of non-fiction (besides his debut, a generic and kinda forgettable Vietnam memoir)
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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one consequence of this is that US colleges and universities are increasingly focused on competing with one another to recruit from a (relatively small) pool of affluent international students, a practice that has become horribly exploitative and dishonest, and that sets many students up for failure
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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i think this essay omits a key piece of the puzzle: published tuition prices may be fictional, but they are also aspirational, in that they incentivize admissions departments to grow the proportion of full-tuition students year-over-year, so as to enhance longterm revenue projections. #academicsky
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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Going After Cacciato is his best, if you ask me
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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also a shame that the only book anybody reads is The Things They Carried, because… um, the other books are way better!
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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extremely beautiful country, wow
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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been doing a deep read of Tim O’Brien (party for a freelance project, mostly as a procrastination strategy) and i’m once again struck by how different his books are from those of his War on Terror-era imitators (Phil Klay etc). what a shame that his style has come so unmoored from his moral vision.
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jonah walters
@jonahwalters.bsky.social
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If you’re curious about that slippery species of social organization we clumsily call “the family,” rest assured: the past 100 years or so have seen no shortage of writing on the subject. Go diving in that deep well & here are some things you’ll learn— (on the family and what to do about it, by me)
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The Appeal
@theappeal.bsky.social
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We need your help!
The Appeal is working urgently to raise $75,000 to ensure we can make it to 2024. Due to a generous donor, every dollar will be matched, doubling your impact.
Please donate and help us spread the word! theappeal.org/donate/
1 replies 15 reposts 14 likes