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[...] models are often paid not in cash, but in ‘trade’, typically clothing or perhaps a handbag. In such cases, employers choose to hire dozens of workers for the cost of their own products, which models effectively advertise by wearing or using them in their highly ‘Instagrammed’ personal life. T…

[...] Modelling work is controlled by agencies and clients in almost every way: how to look, walk, talk, shave, shop, eat, exercise, relate to others are all dictated on and off the clock. In this way, modelling work is an explicit distillation of the social controls usually implicitly experienced …

I think socialist writing has an important and very difficult challenge. One of the things that has become clear to me is that once human beings surrender to the present, the idea of the future wears thin. There is only a present. The present stretches on into infinity. When we say tomorrow, we mea…

Writing should be crisp, not for itself — because there is a new aestheticization of writing, a kind of writing for its own sake. I have many friends who say that V. S. Naipaul — forget his politics — is a great writer. I’m not keen on this kind of attitude.

Writing is a form of communication. T…

W. E. B Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk asked a question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” This was his detonator sentence. It carried the entire book with it. People of African descent in the United States had been made — through slavery and Jim Crow codes — to experience a subdued dignity. Th…