In 1995 the age of 16, Michael Thomas killed 14-year-old Gabriel Alcazar Jr. and was sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison. While incarcerated, Thomas fell in love with baking as part of his work in the prison kitchen but at first, he never dreamed he’d be able to cook and bake on the outside. Today, he’s honing personal recipes and working...

In this thoughtful essay for The Walrus, novelist and culture writer Thea Lim reflects on the value of art, of work, and of the self in a time of constant surveillance, data collection, and digital performance.Thirty years after Agre coined the capture model, workforce management technology can track every moment at work as a production target. Amazon’s...

This deep investigative project from two reporters at UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program exposes the widespread use of “clean record agreements”—secret deals that involve concealing or even destroying records of misconduct and criminality of law enforcement officers across California. Typically, these officers then quietly depart from their...

For Split Lip Magazine, Kasey Butcher Santana writes about leaving academia to become a jail librarian and the deep satisfaction she gets from assisting patrons to find the books and information they’re searching for. She revels in being able to get to know a little more about those she serves by the ephemera left behind as bookmarks in material they’ve...

City, one of the largest pieces of art in the world, is a mile-and-a-half long, half-mile-wide installation in rural Nevada where the Mojave Desert meets the Great Basin—the ancestral home of the Southern Paiutes and Western Shoshone. The concrete and rock sculpture, which took artist Michael Heizer more than 50 years to construct, is viewed with awe,...

Regardless of your belief in—or skepticism about—claims of electromagnetic sensitivity, it’s hard to outright deny the catch-all condition known as “environmental illness.” We’ve been inundated with microplastics and industrial chemicals for decades; some degree of havoc on some human bodies seems all but inevitable. But with 5G towers proliferating...