Strange Matters Magazine
@strangemattersmag.bsky.social
A cooperative magazine of new & unconventional thinking in economics, politics, and culture Proudly worker-owned since our founding in 2020. ~ Pitch us: editors(at)strangematters(dot)coop ~ strangematters.coop
@strangemattersmag.bsky.social had great explanations of why this all is all happening, throughout the Biden administration
𝑏𝑎𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑒 𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑛𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑎𝑠@petestaiano.com · 2w agoNobody talks about how we're all paying $15 for sandwiches now and just pretending that's normal. Five years ago that same sandwich was $8. The price doubled and the only explanation we got was "supply chain issues" which apparently means "forever."
"Mainstream economics doesn’t work. This is true across pretty much all levels of analysis. It can’t predict events in the world, its policy prescriptions lead to disaster when implemented, it lacks any coherent methodology for fixing itself." strangematters.coop/frederic-s-l...
Wobbly Economics – Part I
Fred Lee’s war against the neoclassical economists.
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"Sometimes you leave Bombay and you find yourself in a landlocked city trying to orient yourself towards the sea, or visualize the route from Jayanagar to Dharavi, forgetting that they’re in two different cities." strangematters.coop/cafe-of-lost...
Dream City
A sketch of the artists & rebels who taught us to really see our cities.
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"Let’s say the game of chess is life. Zweig gives us three options: 1. Play like Czentovic, Dr. B’s opponent. 2. Play like Dr. B himself. 3. Don’t play at all." strangematters.coop/the-dialecti...
The Dialectic of Chess Story
Strange Matters Magazine
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"Here we finally get a glimpse at how...Thiel’s two-pronged assault on American democracy can square the circle of its seeming contradictions. National conservatism may offer ‘populist’ energy, but authoritarian capitalism...remains the ultimate goal." strangematters.coop/fascist-econ...
Beyond Athens and Jerusalem
“National conservatives” and “neoreactionaries” on the far right are paying lip service to leftist economics. But their deep motive is a hatred of democracy.
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"In a country that suffered horrendously from the Nazis, and which before was divided between two Germanic empires and Russia for 123 years, it is not hard to imagine that anti-German sentiment is both deeply rooted and a potential vote-winner." strangematters.coop/discriminati...
Nationalists and Ethnic Minorities in Poland
Poland’s far-right government passes new restrictions on the German minority—the latest moment of a long, traumatic history.
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"The only other person there was the security guard who looked bored. Tompkins Square Park wasn’t in the immediate vicinity but was close enough to make me wonder if the riot would possibly reach where I was." strangematters.coop/tompkins-squ...
An Even Odyssey
Tompkins Square Park looked like something had happened to it. There was scattered trash and detritus.
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Studies indicate that worker ownership is generally linked to better productivity, pay, job stability, and firm survival. Worker ownership also supports a more sustainable distribution of wealth, with the potential to significantly decrease inequality. wol.iza.org/articles/doe...
"And looming over it all is Hồ, who’s suspended uneasily between the Communist Party of Vietnam’s hagiography and the forlorn, incongruously dressed guy from the book Andras remembers." strangematters.coop/review-faraw...
The Hero as a Drifting Shadow
Joseph Andras, a working-class neo-modernist novelist, shows us why embalming our revolutionary heroes is a mistake.
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"The game’s mechanics cut straight through the nonsense of colonial propaganda and its stated aims: you are not here to make friends, you are here to steal everything that isn’t nailed down." strangematters.coop/decolonize-b...
Bloodless Board Games, Covert Colonialisms
We ignore the propaganda potential of board games at our peril. At bottom it’s a question of agency.
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"Twenty-seven-year-old Shabbir Ahmed,* a graduate with a degree he can’t use, is among dozens of young men who now trek treacherous goat paths and dense pine trails under the cloak of night." *Name changed strangematters.coop/kashmir-indi...
Border Economies, Broken Lives
Our correspondents report from contested Kashmir, where conflict between India and Pakistan has split families apart.
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"Men court the reception staff with smiles and pleasantries before shiftily breaking club rules and city ordinances. Upstairs, an exercising dude barely acknowledges another whose semen he once swallowed." strangematters.coop/gay-cruising...
Steamroomography
Men have had sex with each other in public spaces since time immemorial. This sensual essay explores how they’ve done so in New York, from personal experience.
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"In a city where a significant portion (upwards of 71%) are still renters, the typical rent is $5,500.13. Meanwhile, nearly 20% of residents, twice the average New Jersey rate, are languishing in poverty." strangematters.coop/jersey-city-...
The Illusion of a Renaissance
Jersey City’s political machine hijacks diversity to push for rent hikes.
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"Throughout the series, in spite of his own ailments, we find Williams keeping the faith he had always tended: that in the recurring rhythms of their days, ordinary communities might subvert the rules that bind them and reinvent their world." strangematters.coop/william-carl...
To Be a Poet, Open Your Eyes
William Carlos Williams is often sidelined as a poet’s poet for modernist snobs. In fact, he was a social poet whose democratic art was for the people.
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"One woman was near to tears as she explained that she saw her husband was at Delaney on the ICE app this morning, & was told by the guard that he wasn’t here after all. Pop. Just like that her husband disappeared, & she was met with the old bureaucratic shrug." strangematters.coop/delaney-hall...
The Puddle at Delaney Hall
Outside the ICE detention center in Newark, mutual aid workers struggle to keep families of the disappeared fed and informed.
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"We would have marched over Sutter and gotten a fabulous, maybe an industry-leading contract. Why was our union opposed to that? Because they had already set a deal on their own." strangematters.coop/national-nur...
Searching For a Pulse
A new caucus fights for rank-and-file democracy in NNU & our hospitals
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"The changes to the US military over 2025 are not unprecedented...The precedents that make the most sense to me, that rhyme most clearly to my ears, are countries that doomed themselves with ethnic division." strangematters.coop/jason-lyall-...
Why Racists Lose Wars
Trump’s military is slashing diversity. Jason Lyall’s book proves ethnic chauvinism loses wars and collapses states
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"Facing the discomfort of this strange reading experience, Lucretia realizes that this collision of perspectives, this moment when both readings of Roc coexist – uneasily – in her mind, is the passage’s heart." strangematters.coop/rose-novick-...
Silent Flight
An ideal reader and honest seeker dives into the world of Zhuangzi, the great Chinese philosopher.
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"The peasant — a category which, in Mexican political discourse then and now, intersects heavily with those racialized or self-identified as indigenous people — was not as readily redeemed or co-opted in this logic." strangematters.coop/the-mexican-...
Casa Against Campesino
The Mexican Revolution’s biggest radicals were libertarian socialists. Their fate holds lessons for us today.
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Just the most remarkable, colossal defeat. The sort of terms you see imposed on a conquered state. Iran has basically given nothing (the toll booth isn't ruled out) and has achieved huge concessions This section - where the US agrees to withdraw forces from the region - is particularly astonishing
Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social · 2mo agoHere's the Iran-US MoU, and it's pretty much a severe strategic defeat and capitulation for the US and a massive strategic and economic victory for Iran. Really an utter humiliation for the US thanks to Trump's naked incompetence. edition.cnn.com/2026/06/17/m...
"...a roadshow – meeting potential investors, boozing and schmoozing with them, giving their pitch over and over again. (Well, these days you might just get a Zoom call full of stock analysts unmuting themselves to say “Nothing on my end, thanks” – but anyway.)" strangematters.coop/how-financia...
The Resilience of Order Flow
Everyone asks at some point or another: how does the stock market work? Thanks to the order flow theorists, we now have the definitive account.
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'“I once saw a bird take off from here,” It said, “I saw the effort of its flight. It strained and rippled in the headwinds But it has stayed in the air ever since. It has not come back near me.” A sigh was then heard across the water...' strangematters.coop/grant-pavol-...
A Selection of Poems
There had been for as long as anyone could remember a short pile of mud…
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"They’ll make you watch a documentary about the planning and construction of Rockefeller Center that’s something like if Waystar Royco’s Parks division had written a Bioshock cutscene." strangematters.coop/atlas-dabbed...
Atlas Dabbed
Suspended over this one-to-one-scale map of my doomed metropolis, I saw all at once the extent of the sickness that had fallen on New York.
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"Fain’s vision ties unions with flexes of imperial power, preserving American unions’ complicity in the military-industrial complex. (It’s harder to cheer for unionized workers making the bombs that Israel drops to incinerate the civilians of Gaza.)" strangematters.coop/labor-notes-...
Notes on Labor Notes
Strange Matters Magazine
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"That date marked the fall of the Sacred Band of Thebans, a cavalry battalion that was said to be made up entirely of gay male partnerships. (Ives requested members not date each other to prevent his Order from becoming a cruising spot.)" strangematters.coop/oscar-wilde-...
The Importance of Being Hermes
Surely we all know Oscar Wilde. Aesthete, dilettante, artist, flaneur…and occult practitioner? The untold, esoteric story.
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here's a thing i wrote about it that i think is pretty good! lmk if you cannot access it
Strange Matters Magazine@strangemattersmag.bsky.social · 5mo agoA classic of world philosophy, the Zhuangzi revolutionized ethics and ontology forever with its Dao. Now, in our latest issue, Rose Novick brings this masterpiece to a new generation of English readers with her magisterial translation & commentary. strangematters.coop/rose-novick-...
"What we have in this country today is not only capitalism, but a debased and sickly form of it; and not only compared to the past, but even to other versions of capitalism found elsewhere today." strangematters.coop/critique-of-...
What is the DOGE?
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the total loss of economic planning knowledge.
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"If you cremate someone, you need a permit to scatter them. But out in water, only the boat needs a permit. Cliff gets one from the city. They live off referrals from hippies, who always know someone grieving." strangematters.coop/selen-ozturk...
Four Stories
A suicidal crow (or is it a seagull?) — the most salacious therapy circle — leaving the dinner date — meeting Petra. In short: four stories.
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"When a network of rich Democratic donors wanted to force Biden to remove himself from the 2024 presidential race as a candidate, they did not stage a multi-day sit-in...What they did have was money – lots of it." strangematters.coop/critique-of-...
Contra Contra
Moderate leftists like Contrapoints say radicals skeptical of electoralism don’t really want power. But what if real power looks like a socialist keiretsu?
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