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This wasn’t entirely inevitable
Since last week’s local and devolved elections, I’ve heard a lot of the I-word floating around. How inevitable everything was. How voters were dissatisfied with the pace of change so it was inevitable that Labour would lose. I think Morgan had cards left to play—maybe Labour couldn’t have kept power, but she could’ve kept her…
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What I’m thinking about on the day of the 2026 Senedd elections
Today, Scotland and Wales both have devolved parliamentary elections. So, here in Cymru, we’re deciding who will represent us in the Senedd in Cardiff, our capital. Unless the polls have been incredibly mistaken, Labour’s century-long hold on Cymru is over. The question is: what’s next? Will UK’s answer to MAGA, Reform, come away as the…
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What the Middle Ages Can Tell Us About Racial Reconfiguration and Political Realignment Today
We are living in an era of renewed “flexible definitions,” when everything old is new again — “a moment in which cultural race and racisms, and religious race, jostle alongside race-understood-as-somatic/biological determinations — uncannily renews key medieval instrumentalizations in the ordering of human relations.” The Welsh weren’t the first cornered into renouncing their identity to…
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Thoughts from the 2:37 bus for Amalfi
A young woman’s coat has claimed the last free seat on the bus. Incredulous, you would later comment that it was rude of her not to move it. But, hanging on with both hands as the bus trundled along the too-tight turns, I only thought about how proud I was of you.
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New article on Nation.Cymru
Separated by five years and a day, the events of January 6, 2021 and January 7, 2026 will remain stamped in the memories of Americans for a generation. The first, when we realised that a peaceful transition of power is no longer a given following the attempted insurrection at the US capitol. The second, when…
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When do we stop seeing this as an aberration?
Today, as the United States inches closer toward forcible regime change in Venezuela, I wonder what any of this is for. What’s on the other side of this madness? How long do we insist “this is not who we are” until accepting evidence to the contrary?
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History from the cheap seats: Paris 2024
We arrived in Paris the night before the July 7 legislative elections. So much effort had been invested in the Olympic Games, but now, faced with the possibility of the far right coming in first place, the city was boarding up, unsure of what the night would hold.
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I support Palestine because I’m queer, not in spite of it
Maybe you’ve seen the meme: Queers for Palestine is like chickens for KFC. Join me as I take on some of the arguments that the LGBTQ community should be pro-Israel. For me, I’m pro-ceasefire, pro-peace, and pro-Palestine because I’m queer, not in spite of it.
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Americans are the frog in the pot, part I: Grand Rapids
Grand Rapids is a weird place to call home. Today it’s all breweries and hipsters and weed dispensaries and overpriced apartments. But growing up, it was Bland Rapids. A place so boring and unimaginative that corporations would come to town to trial new products. If the straight-laced, God-fearing people of Grand Rapids, Michigan, will buy…