I started and stopped this newsletter a few times over the past few months, for reasons that will become clear as you read on. Here is a breakdown of the last few months in the form of drafts from each month.

February:

I had a whole bunch of newsletter posts planned this year but I’m putting pretty much everything on hold to deal with a new reality, which is a resurgence of long covid symptoms that I thought I had entirely recovered from more than a year ago. The aperture of my day has gotten smaller and my energy is quickly soaked up by doing things like making breakfast and showering, so my extracurricular activities and my ability to structure my life are on hold. This is frustrating to write out and it’s frustrating to live through because I have so many things I want to work on and do and now I feel like my main job is eating enough food that I don’t get lightheaded.

Unlike the last time I fell into a long covid fatigue void in 2024 the world is both lacking in public health infrastructure to deal with covid but also there are more treatments and meds and understanding about long covid by medical practitioners. I’ve been invited into long covid group chats and multiple people with long covid have reached out to me to give me tips and tricks and medication suggestions and moral and emotional support. I’ve gotten suggestions on the best things to help with brain fog and lightheadedness and extreme, debilitating fatigue I’ve been experiencing.

But doctor’s appointments take too long and outside of a few long covid clinics most practitioners are not familiar with the best prescriptions.

April

What I’ve Learned on my journey back from the land of the dead:

*If you have long covid you are suddenly initiated into an underground club of radical dissidents who instantly know one another and acknowledge each other with headnods and secrets handshakes. They can telepathically sense that you are one of the Chosen and invite you to secret groupchats and text chains where you are given news of the One Drug To Rule Them All and argue about masking etiquette and complain about doctors.

*Low Dose Naltrexone is a very little-discussed drug that seemingly everyone in the chronic illness whisper network is plugged into but which many doctors have somehow still never heard of. It is as close as there is to a miracle drug for chronic fatigue syndrome (and is used for chronic pain and immune system issues stemming from inflammation.) Naltrexone in regular doses (50mg) is used for opioid withdrawal. Low Dose Naltrexone (1-4.5mg) has to be specially compounded at boutique pharmacies and is not covered by insurance. For some reason the low dose version has anti-inflammatory qualities that regular dose naltrexone does not.

*There are a bunch of over the counter supplements that help with brain fog and POTS (getting dizzy standing up) that are available over the counter. They include alpha lipoic acid and N-Acetylcysteine (NAC).

*I did not get to the point where I filed for disability. But I had no choice but to take several weeks off of work. I am a freelancer and do not have sick leave. I am fortunate that I received financial support from family, without which I would be in rent arrears and thousands of dollars in debt.

*For my birthday in April I asked my friends to bring me healing talismans to fortify me for my journey across the River Styx and back to the land of the living. They brought me: a beautiful watercolor tarot of a south asian trans woman doing a healing spell, by my friend the graphic novelist Rani Som, a doodle of a dog in a cape by my girlfriend, the graphic novelist NA, several beautiful stones, a seashell that still had sand in it, a mug that said “You’re Awesome Keep That Shit Up,” a child’s temporary tattoo.

Did they work? I don’t know. I mean objectively yes, magic is real and my friends are all sorcerers, but other than the god-like ability to transmute my body into a cosmic web of healing energy I don’t know that it did anything. Ultimately the low-dose naltrexone did melt away some of the fatigue and eased my inflammation, and by the end of the month I was slowly recovering.

May

I had enough energy to go on a dream retreat, which is a retreat where we talk about dreams, in New Lebanon. We spent some time at the dream attic of poet Bernadette Mayer, which is a large library attic in her house (her property is now called “Poetry State Forest”) filled with books on dreams, novels (including a great deal of Doris Lessing books, including her final sci fi sequence!), old poetry journals, books on physics and the gestation of the universe. We were told that Bernadette awoke at 3:15 A.M. every morning to write down her dreams as did some of her friends, because they heard this is when the mouth of the universe is wide open. Because I am fatigued I have trouble ascending stairs and stayed downstairs in the poetry library, where I flitted between Writer Sollers by Roland Barthes, the works of Lucretius and sometime else I don’t remember.

The next night at my friend’s house nearby, I browsed an art book called Memory, a collection of hundreds of photographs and journal entries that Bernadette took in the month of July 1971. I love that this is a liveblog before there were liveblogs and seeing such a tiny sliver of time rendered as something so sprawling and infinite vindicated something I often think about time: that the reason we think it goes so fast is because we don’t, or can’t take the time to render its events in minutiae. To really reflect on what what you did in a single month this year would likely unload more revelation and adventure than you are prepared to handle. (There is a Borges short story I often think of about this, called Funes the Memorious, about a man who remembers too much and can no longer function) Later, we watched a dream related episode of Muppet Babies and accidentally watched the wrong episode of Northern Exposure (Or “NoSpo” as someone I know calls it). We meant to watch Mr. Sandman, about the town sharing their dreams, but watched an episode about the pregnant Shelly meeting her time-traveling future daughter.

**

Right now I’m more or less functional; I went from the absolute worst health of my life, where even walking to the kitchen was too exhausting to handle, where I was not able to write more than one sentence a day and couldn’t focus enough to watch t.v. or read for too long, to being at 80% of my normal energy levels. I realize that my health is going to be up and down for an unknown amount of time and that my body is a haunted house with trap doors that will keep springing at inopportune moments until the roof collapses. I am not always at peace with this but at the moment I am enjoying the ability to think and move and talk to people, do the work I care about and try to plot the future.

If you’re interested in reading more thoughtful explorations of long covid, check out my friend Zehra’s newsletter The Hot and the Disabled.

Books I’m Reading:

Okay I’m having the weird experience of every book I’ve read in the past few months has been great.

Oreo by Fran Ross – I recommend everyone read this cult classic 1971 novel, a dense, reference-heavy and at times obtuse satire about a young Jewish Black girl from Philly trying to find her father in New York City. It has some of the most bonkers sentences I have read in a novel. Actually every other sentence is the most bonkers sentence I’ve read in a novel and the punchline per page ratio is out of control. I definitely did not get all of the references (Yiddish slang, late 60’s pop culture, lots of call-backs) so I will need an annotated edition or a book group for a re-read of this at some point.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - I’m dumb because I’ve never read this before and literally did not know that this book is about kerala or malayalis or caste and class anxiety or casteist communists and casteist malayali mar thoma christians, all things i am interested in as a malayali raised in a mar thoma christian community that i have not been part of since i was a teenager but have no ill will toward because i’m very polite. I’ve read most of Arundhati Roy’s nonfiction and had just never picked this up. It is embarrassing to make it to middle age (sorry to readers who mistakenly thought I was a youth) and not know there’s a booker prize winning book about your people that has been in plain sight your whole life.

The Autobiography of Angela Davis by Angela Davis > also embarrassed i never read this before, it’s compelling and so informative about the context of Black radicalism and the political moment of the 1960s and 1970s, the urgency of that moment, the disaster that was Jonathan Jackson and George Jackson’s murders and Davis’ arrest. Everyone should read this book along with Assata’s autobiography.

Fire in Every Direction by Tareq Beconi > Loved this! There are a lot of memoirs where it’s not totally clear that the book should exist or if the author really had a story to tell or if they just wanted to add “memoir” to their resume. This book definitely has a beautiful story to tell, about young queer feelings, the queerness that pervades ostensibly heterosexual friendships and lifelong shadow that broken friendships leave.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple > A vital counterhistory of antizionist Jews fighting antisemitism in the early to mid twentieth century. It’s the story of the Russian and Polish Jews during both Russian revolutions (1905 and 1917), the Great War and World War II from the perspective of the Jewish Labor Bund, which was founded at the same time as the much more well-funded Zionist movement and found itself both morally opposed and sometimes in turf wars with Zionists. The Labor Bund were anti-nationalist and anti-racist, viewing zionism as morally flawed and a recipe for perpetual war. They saw, correctly, that a Jewish supremacist state in Palestine could only come at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians. The Bund was effective: they organized Russian Jews in Odessa during a pogrom during the 1905 revolution and helped organize Polish Jews in the Warsaw ghetto uprising during WWII. I’ve read so many books about Palestine over the past two and a half years and this is the first one about a historically-grounded anti-zionist Jewish perspective. (I’m also looking forward to Antizionism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser, which comes out later this year.)

Music I’m listening to

Maryam Saleh - Syrr

Kehlani - Kehlani

Actress/ Suzanne Ciani - Concréte Waves

Rosa Pistola - Incorregible

Squarepusher - Komerkonzert

Laurel Halo - Midnight Zone soundtrack

sunn O))) - SUNN O)))

Thundercat - Distracted

OHYung - IOWA

Jeff Parker - Happy Today

Essays I’ve Been Reading:

Muck and Its Entanglements - John Berger’s 1989 meditation on the nature of shit and his annual tradition of cleaning the family outhouse. In Berger’s reading shit occupies something between death - the unavoidable inhuman thing we avoid - and life, fertilizer from which life sprouts.

talk to you later

R.

Every year around this time my friend Mon and I host a Valentine’s Day reading of letters and writing of letters called ‘Love Letters.’ We get a bunch of poets and writers and organizers and other friends to read letters from archives: letters between famous writers and artists and letters from our readers’ own archives; including adolescent letters to crushes, letters they received from loved ones, letters they almost sent but didn’t, or new epistolary poems or stories they wrote just for the occasion. Afterward, the audience joins us in writing letters to incarcerated women in collaboration with different prison writing projects. This year we’re partnering with Let’s Get Free, the women and trans prisoner defense committee.

If you’re in or near NYC, you’re invited to join us on Saturday February 14th at 7pm, at The Word Is Change at 368 Tompkins Street in Brooklyn. We’ll be joined by Deepali Zeer, Dash Z, Sophia Gurule, Tyler Morse, AK, Chanice Hughes-Greenberg, Aliyah Blackmore, Joselia Rebekah Hughes, Eae and maybe more surprise guests. It’s cold outside so wear your mittens. Pens and postcards will be provided for those who want to write a letter and we’ll post and send the cards ourselves. These are one-off postcards, but if you want to maintain a longer correspondence you can include your address.

This year’s reading is called The Temporary Sacred: Love Letters Vol. 7. The phrase “temporary sacred” is a reference to a line in a June Jordan poem that I linked to in this newsletter last week, “On a New Year’s Eve.”

the temporary sacred
tales ago
first bikeride round the house
when you first saw a squat
opossum
carry babies on her back
opossum up
in the persimmon tree
you reeling toward
that natural
first
absurdity
with so much wonder still
it shakes your voice

                               the temporary is the sacred
                               takes me out

and even the stars and even the snow and even
the rain
do not amount to much
unless these things submit to some disturbance
some derangement such
as when I yield myself/belonging
to your unmistaken
body

I hope you’re finding a source of warmth in this deep cold and some hands to lift you up.

Yrs,

Roshan

I spent the last few weeks deep in the archives, piecing together unpublished writing by one of my literary and intellectual heroes for a forthcoming essay. I found when I came out the other end I was quite sad. I had fallen into grief over someone I never met, who died years before I had even read her work. The thing about living on after death through writing or videos or whatever is that when people engage with your work, if you really do come alive through that work then you can also die again in the sense that you’re perpetually grievable, especially if you have unfinished odds and ends as I guess we all do. The space between what someone aspires to accomplish and what they are able to finish is also a space for grief. or can be. So I’ve been in a weird place of reviving, grieving and writing.

Relatedly the other night I learned about and watched this documentary from 1991 called A Place of Rage, which features footage of Angela Davis and June Jordan jogging (separately and not together) and Angela Davis aggressively playing tennis. I’m not saying you should watch this documentary because you want to see Angela Davis playing tennis or June Jordan jogging across 125th Street and getting onto a subway car but I would not judge you if that’s why you want to watch it. Here’s an interview with the director, Pratibha Parmar, who explains that the idea for the film came after June stayed with her in the U.K. and they took a trip to Paris where they met up with Angela Davis and none of them could get a cab.

And here’s a video of a 2018 symposium where the poet Solmaz Sharif says she took June Jordan’s “Poetry For the People” class at UC Berkeley in 2001/2002 but never met June because she was too sick. Before Jordan passed away from cancer in 2002, she asked an instructor to read this poem aloud to her class to mark her passage. Solmaz Sharif does a great job reading this poem, which ends with the words, “All things are dear that disappear,” but here’s audio of June reading it too. It’s hard not to cry, though, after watching Sharif’s context for how she first heard the poem. What I’m saying is I’ve been getting lost in the archives lately.

It’s probably good that we don’t accomplish everything we wish to in life because honestly wouldn’t that be weird. Like what if you had a checklist of things you wanted to do and got to every single thing and after you checked off the last thing on the list you are beamed up to Heaven. Alternatively what if you could create a checklist but ignore the last few items and through a loophole remain alive eternally, etc. But more importantly I’m seeing the work of some writers and activists and artists as enlisting others into the larger project of political world-making. By definition it is unfinished work, an invitation for others to finish.

I’m reading Mutual Aid by Dean Spade. It’s very short. Most of it is like advice for what do if you are in a mutual aid group and why that is good. One thing that comes up is the risk of people taking on work that should be done by the state, with its extensive resources. Work which is gladly offloaded by the state to volunteers to limit the government’s responsibility, which is what neoliberalism is. What is the balance between that and having the state - or philanthropies - take over a project in a way that de-mobilizes people or restricts aid to people based on hierarchies of deserving-ness. The book has some suggestions for that and some check-ins you can do but I don’t think there are easy answers.

A few days ago my brother told me his dog was dying. My brother’s dog lives at my mom’s house and I pretty much only see it when I visit her. I have often complained about this dog to friends because he whimpers and whines a lot but in reality he is very hungry for attention and I’m sad to say he never really got enough of it. But I’ve grown accustomed to his presence and ultimately sympathize with him as a formerly emotionally needy human. Dogs are always grievable because they have baby brains and personalities so when they die you just want to rend your garments and scream at the heavens. Animals do not leave unfinished business on this earth but they sometimes provoke guilt of unfinished business in their humans; I should have taken this baby on more walks etc.

It’s really cold outside. It’s colder in other places for sure but it’s more cold in New York City than we are used to. At least 16 people have died outdoors, 13 from the cold in the past week. There are some people who sleep under an overpass across the street from me. Last week I got some cold weather kits from my local food pantry (which I was connected to through a mutual aid group); it contained scarves, socks, gloves, hand-warmers, shaving cream and deodorant. My roommate fundraised and we got some hats, sweaters and hot food ahead of the snow storm last week. A few days after the snowstorm the police had cordoned off the overpass where the men sleep for a few hours. There was an ambulance. I don’t know what happened. I hope it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

The next day I stopped by again - some of the regulars were not there and there were two new people. I offered to get them a car to a “warming center,” which in New york City are hospitals, schools and some buses that have been set up to accept people living on the street.

One person said yes but only on the condition that he be allowed to take his shopping cart which contains all his belongings. I offered to call around to see whether any of the nearby warming centers would allow him to take a shopping cart even though I knew the likely answer was probably. No. It was virtually impossible to get an answer; myself and two of my roommates were calling hospitals and 311 and were transferred over and over again. When I finally got someone on the phone they said, “I do not know the answer to that. I’m sorry.” They did seem sorry. and kind of sad. Eventually we learned from someone else that NYC hospital warming centers only allow homeless people to take their backpacks. We relayed this to the man on the street, who said he preferred to take his chances outdoors than lose his stuff. He stayed there that night and we didn’t see him there the next day. I hope he is somewhere warm.

Here is a HellGate article about some of the things the city could be doing better to prevent deaths from the cold but I would add that new york city and every city should not make people choose between staying warm and having things. People do not want to lose everything they own in the world, which often includes warm clothes, medication, cherished family items, tools they need to work odd jobs. Also. Not everyone is going to come inside. Years of experience in carceral shelter settings have degraded trust for many people and yes sometimes there is also mental illness, because living outside is traumatic. Bring clothes, gloves, warm socks, thermals, hand-warmers to people sleeping outside. Hot food if you’ve got it. (And if you call a government number make sure it doesn’t trigger an encampment sweep which will just lead to someone’s warm clothes getting thrown out along with everything they own in the world.) Anyway I hope you are asking people what they need today and I hope you have what you need and that someone asks you what you need today.

Here I had a planned a sentence to tie together the disparate threads of this newsletter but I’m tired and I’d rather not. I hope we all have more energy tomorrow.

From "On A New Year's Eve" by June Jordan:

let the world blot
obliterate remove so-
called
magnificence
so-called
almighty/fathomless and everlasting/
treasures/
wealth
(whatever that may be)

it is this time
that matters

it is this history
I care about

the one we make together
awkward
inconsistent
as a lame cat on the loose
or quick as kids freed by the bell
or else as strictly
once
as only life must mean
a once upon a time

I have rejected propaganda teaching me
about the beautiful
the truly rare

(supposedly
the soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shore
supposedly
the soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shore
is beautiful
for instance)
but
the truly rare can stay out there

I have rejected that
abstraction that enormity
unless I see a dog walk on the beach/
a bird seize sandflies
or yourself
approach me
laughing out a sound to spoil
the pretty picture
make an uncontrolled
heartbeating memory
instead

I read the papers preaching on
that oil and oxygen
that redwoods and the evergreens
that trees the waters and the atmosphere
compile a final listing of the world in
short supply

but all alive and all the lives
persist perpetual
in jeopardy
persist
as scarce as every one of us
as difficult to find
or keep
as irreplaceable
as frail
as every one of us

and
as I watch your arm/your
brown arm
just
before it moves

I know

all things are dear
that disappear

all things are dear
that disappear

Further Reading

A Strike is Not a Spell

Music I’ve Been Listening To

Julianne Barwick & Mary Lattimore - Tragic Magic I love this album by ambient musician Julianne Barwick and harpist Mary Lattimore, it sounds just like its name, lots of lost in a forest uncovering a dark amulet reading a cryptic scroll vibes. One of the songs features an enchanting whistling that sounds like an Ennio Morricone score. Just lovely.

Katelin Aurelia Smith - Gush I’ve been hit or miss on Aurelia Smith’s ambient music in the past but I do enjoy this lush, sensual, fun album that throws in some glitchy chiptunes effects and has one or two more straightforward synth-heavy pop songs.

Books I’ve Been Reading

The Saint of Bright Doors - Vajra Chandrasekera > I would love to talk about this with you if you’ve read it?

The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula LeGuin > This one too

Mutual Aid - Dean Spade

You may be surprised to be receiving more than one newsletter from me in the course of a month and that’s okay. Just breathe and we’ll get through this together as a family like we always do. I’m trying something new where I update with more frequency about what I’m doing, reading and thinking about and highlighting some news that reaches my inbox, particularly about housing, land and the like.

A few weeks ago I went to Interference Archive, which is an anarchist community space in Brooklyn that functions like a community archive. (I think? Surprisingly this was my first time visiting so correct me if I’m less than correct about that.) My friend Amanda invited me to a screening of two documentaries about the squatters movement in the Lower East Side in the 1970s-1990s.

During the 1970’s financial crisis in NYC, there was famously a glut of unoccupied, deteriorating buildings that landlords were leaving to decay or setting ablaze to collect the insurance. On the Lower East Side a bunch oforganizers, including young families, overtook unused buildings, did DIY rehabs to set up electricity, plumbing, sometimes building out walls and bathrooms, fixing roofs and leaks and replacing windows and then just kinda living in them, often for years.

The squats inevitably faced police raids throughout the Koch, Dinkins and Giuliani administrations, despite the buildings being unused. The occupants threw rent parties, mobilized residents against police raids and engaged in mutual aid while trying to maintain their precarious shelter. There were demands for the city to invest in the buildings, offer amnesty and ownership to people living in them. (Slightly surreal documentary footage that has periodically gone viral shows a child Rosario Dawson living in one of these squats on East 13th Street and speaking to a journalist as her parents look on.)

In 2002, the Bloomberg administration struck a deal with 11 of the squats to rehabilitate them into affordable housing, in many cases HDFC co-ops with some of the original residents still living there.

The Interference Archive show is called Through Padlocks, Behind Barricades, and consists mostly of photographs, zines and flyers detailing Glass House, a squat on the Lower East Side that was formerly an abandoned glass factory, as photographed by Margaret Morton, who documented unhoused people in NYC for decades. (You can buy a book of Morton’s photographs from Glass House, aptly titled Glass House, from the publisher.)

On December 2, as part of “Through Padlocks..” there was a screening of two documentaries about the LES squats, both relying heavily on archival footage. A 1978 doc by Marlis Momber called “Viva Loisaida!” and a 2025 documentary called “Survival Without Rent” by Katie Heiserman and Elana Meyers. The latter is named for a zine of the same name that the filmmakers found at Interference Archive, a DIY how-to manual for transforming an abandoned building into a squat. The documentaries, both around 20 minutes, look at squats on 13th Street and 11th Street that organized against a backdrop of skepticism or hostility from broadcast media. (Survival Without Rent features video of a newscaster looking into the camera and saying, “Squatters, who are they and what do they want?”)

Another documentary released in 2021, simply called “Squatters” and directed by Catalina Santamaría - which I saw when it screened in Jackson Heights at Terraza 7 - explores a Lower East Side squat called Umbrella House. That documentary uses footage shot by the house’s residents themselves, aspiring filmmakers who kept hours and hours of camcorder footage. Umbrella House is named for umbrellas that of various colors an artist stuck from the building’s windows durings its heyday in the 90’s. The building was among those transformed into co-ops in the early 2000’s, and many of the original squatters still live there and have cultivated a community garden on the building’s rooftop.

These documentaries are compelling most obviously because they contrast the rigidly policed and spatially inaccessible NYC of today with an unrecognizable NYC that existed not too long ago; one in many ways much worse economically, more dangerous, but where desperation and a real estate apocalypse had created a set of political possibilities seemingly long-since foreclosed, an alien landscape unconquered by realtors and developers. There are still squats scattered across the city - I have friends who live in or have lived in some - but generally they are not publicized for obvious reasons and are very small. The city is much more militarized than it was in the 1970s, and the NYPD now has (even more) tanks, robots, dogs, robot dogs, busses, bombs, tear gas, sonic weapons, cell phone readers, submachine guns, battering rams, drones and a plethora of other war machines they haven’t told us about because federal funding does not come with public disclosure requirements except in narrow cases. There are still derelict buildings around the city but because land values have exploded those buildings’ owners have a higher incentive to call the cops on trespassers. There are still vacant apartment units scattered around the city, although there is conjecture about how many and it’s likely a fraction of what was left unattended in the 1970s. Generally when I hear about squatting now it’s not a coalition of politicized people creating community-run housing on the margins, it’s a few people who are unsheltered and suffering from other crises trying to get in from the cold.

The most early organized squats in the Lower East Side in the 1970’s were coordinated by Puerto Rican gangs, but most of the documentaries emerging now involve footage from the 80’s and 90’s when the squats were more heterogeneous and drew in a range of artists and queer folks of different class and race backgrounds. The recent docs don’t really address any of the racial dynamics in the squats although “Squatters,” the Umbrella House doc, notes the tension over negotiations with the city over the squat’s formalization.

The 20th century squatter’s movements did transform the city in a few ways, mainly by creating more on-ramps to legitimacy for informal residents and community ownership. The city began a program where it gave out grants of up to $10,000 per unit to people rehabilitating vacant buildings and offered ownership to inhabitants for $250. A nonprofit grew out of the crisis called the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board that began organizing squatters; they now organize tenants who want to cooperatively buy their properties into limited equity cooperatives, where resale prices are set by a board of tenants, usually below market rents. Most recently UHAB purchased a Bronx building in collaboration with a group of tenants.

Yet, for most New Yorkers, the term “squatter” mostly persists in service of the myth that NYC has extraordinarily lenient tenant laws and anyone can essentially steal an apartment building by hanging out for long enough. Extreme cases of scammers and grifters, some of whom get “true crime” style longreads in the country’s few remaining prestige magazines, have hardened the imaginations of both renters and landlords. But several high profile tabloid cases of “squatters” that went viral a few years ago turned out to be tenants exercising their legally-protected right to withhold rent if the their housing is uninhabitable. In reality, the theft of housing is almost invariably top-down and goes unenforced and unremarked upon. It consists of illegal lockouts, illegal rent hikes on stabilized units and rampant harassment.

The association of the word “squatter” with freeloader is ironic given its origins. The term “squatter” first entered the American legal lexicon to refer to American settlers building homes on unceded indigenous land that was not yet legally within the scope of the American project, in the hopes of getting eventual legal access to that land.

As Robert Nichols writes in Theft is Property!, the early colonial life of the United States saw irreconcilable conflict between European conceptions of private property and Indigenous tribal understandings of land. In order to steal land from the native peoples of the Americas, settlers introduced the concept of private property, granted those property “rights” to native people forcibly or deceptively and then transferred the newly-privatized property to settler hands, introducing the idea of theft to create property. The American legal system did little to reign them in and police were often sympathetic.

This also points to the tension inherent in the framework of American squatter’s movements. The legal grey area that allowed squatters in the 1970’s to claim rights to the property they were inhabiting came from the same law that enabled colonial “squatting” as ethnic cleansing: the 1862 Homestead Act, which allowed American citizens living on unceded indigenous territory to take legal possession of land they stole if they put in the labor of building their own homes. It led to the theft and privatization of 270 million acres of indigenous land. The organized squatters movements of the latter 20th century, by contrast, focused on buildings in disuse and intentionally attempted to point out to the contradiction of surplus land and capital during a time when there was little habitable private rentals. But the city, in some of its policy responses, essentially tried to formalize the squats as private property and offer them to their occupants rather than using it as an opportunity to create new public housing or community-owned housing.

One last thing I’ll add is Mike Davis’s critique “self-help housing,” the founding philosophy of groups like UHAB, and the romanticization of squatting. So-called “self-help housing” was popularized by an anarchist named John Turner who was inspired by self-built homes on the urban periphery in the global south, ie. slums. Turner saw these constructions as hopeful and worth emulating. Apparently, the World Bank felt the same way and began funding programs for people to build and own their own homes in the 1980s,called sites and services.

To Mike Davis, NGOs swooping in and formalizing squats and encouraging residents to put in so-called “sweat equity” to build their own dwellings was a global neoliberal trend that justified state disinvestment and deterred collective ownership. He criticized the World Bank’s attraction to the idea of self help as destructive, as it led to millions of dollars of loans doled out to developers and NGOs and mostly resulted in privatized land, gentrification, and a broader remit for the World Bank’s neoliberal policies. (To be fair, according to one researcher, Turner was also opposed to the World Bank’s approach.)

According to Davis, writing in his 2005 book Planet of Slums: “Praising the praxis of the poor became a smokescreen for reneging upon historic state commitments to relieve poverty and homelessness.” Davis said that the “golden age” for squatting had long passed by 1990, as most of the available land outside urban centers had been usurped or influenced by developers.

So what to make of recent excavations of NYC’s squatter movements? I think there is always a tension when romanticizing histories of mutual aid as they flourish within, and point directly to organized abandonment. NYC’s squatters movements are no different. But it is hard to ignore the contradictions that were highlighted by these squatter’s movements: the city preferred to send tanks to the door of abandoned buildings than pay for them to be fixed or pay peoples’ rents, and publicizing that embarrassment provided leverage for negotiations. Even if most of the squats were evicted, it matters when the adults in the room figuratively trip over their own shoelaces while the wretched of the earth still manage to move with dignity.

Recommended Reading

Sam Stein, author of Capital City is one of the contemporary writers on housing whose thinking and insights I’ve found valuable. Here he is in Jewish Currents describing the bind that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani finds himself: not only is he kneecapped by the outgoing mayor, the governor and the president, but the city’s tax base is largely fueled by property taxes and real estate speculation; the same speculation that is responsible for infinitely rising rents, evictions and spiking homelessness.

This piece on Dropsite News: Trump, Gaza and Oslo Déja Vu is very long, but it’s as good of an analysis as any Western news site is going to perform of what the Palestinian politics of Gaza and the West Bank look like: widespread distrust of the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas and extra-legal attempts to exclude militant resistant groups from the democratic polity at U.S. and Israel’s behest, even as Israel continues its genocide and encourages waves of terror by settler militias.

This piece by Panashe Chigumadzi, The Land Question, in Boston Review is also very long (I read it in two sittings, one of which was a bus trip) that breaks down the problem with “Apartheid” as a lense to look at settler colonial projects. Chigumadzi points out that South African Apartheid was the concluding chapter of a more than 300 year long settler-colonial project and that by using a Western liberal “rights-based” framework to end it, the colonial state was never truly dismantled. Chigumadzi believes the Apartheid lense also erases the Trans-Atlantic slave trade as foundational to colonization in Africa. As someone who is curious about South African history but doesn’t know much beyond the big sweeping overview I appreciated this read.

Music I’m Listening To:

Amel Larrieux - Morning

Blood Orange - Essex Honey

What I’m Reading:

Alejandro Varela, The People Who Report More Stress

R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

charlie jane anders, Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

Post Credits Scene:

Happy Holidays: House of Tomorrow Will Return in 2026 (Ominous)

This newsletter will be released more frequently next year, with more essays and analysis as well as Q&A’s with authors. I’m still working out the frequency as my paid freelance journalism takes up most of my week. The overarching theme of this blog (I’m going to call it a blog) will be housing, land, food sovereignty, energy and people resisting various imperialisms. I will also continue to tell you what books I’m reading and what music I’m listening to.

If that sounds like something you want to support you can always sign up for a paid subscription. Any amount helps as I find spare time to build out House of Tomorrow as its own project in the first half of next year.

Happy holidays and blessings for 2026

Hello lads, I’m writing to you from Queens the day after the day after the murder holiday. Once again we prepare for the long winter by hoarding berries and nuts in our mouths and wiring our jaws shut while we sit in silence for 90 dark days and nights, waiting for the sun to return, listening only to the occasional hum of a haunting “christmas carol.” When we return from hibernation, flowers will be shimmering thousands of gorgeous and blinding colors, the sun will once again shower us with light that we refuse to harness for productive purposes, choosing instead to blanket our skin in its rays until our cells mutate.

The election of a Muslim socialist in New York was a bit like the end of Ghostbusters 2 - arguably the greatest New York movie ever made - in that (50%) of New Yorkers were momentarily coated with a kind of radiant ectoplasmic goo of optimism as the Statue of Liberty became a kaiju and stalked Manhattan. But hating the mayor is really the only thing that truly brings New Yorkers together so I don’t imagine it will last long. As a perennial hater I don’t really have a problem with this, but as a person who cares about policy because I care about people, I hope that this window of opportunity is not squandered.

What I’ve Been Up To:

In August, I curated and hosted a virtual panel called Journalism Futures: Funding Under Fascism, with Mazin Sidahmed of Documented, Lara Witt, Editor In Chief of Prism and Alicia Bell of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. You can watch video of the event below. It is a frank discussion with some thoughtful and principled journalists and thinkers where we discuss the Palestine exception to free speech, the failure of American journalism to do immigration coverage during the Biden era and how it led to today’s fascism, and the way that newsrooms are now caving to “AI” partnerships despite the wholesale theft of journalistic labor by the world’s largest tech companies. Please give it a watch, and infinite thanks to my colleague Kate Harloe at the Freelance Solidarity Project for helping me organize this.

On October 23rd at McNally Jackson Seaport I was in conversation with my friend and one of my literary heroes Myriam Gurba to celebrate her new book Poppy State, a vertiginous, restless, at times haunting and at times calming treatise on the colonial life of California’s land, the true names of plants, and healing from patriarchal violence. I’ve read nearly all of Myriam’s books, including zines and chapbooks, and think this is one of the best! You should pick it up.

Open World

As mentioned in my previous newsletter, I curated a writing workshop series in October called Open World, where workshop leaders had a broad prompt to lead sessions based on the themes of world-building and community care. It was held at the mutual aid space Come Forever in Williamsburg. There were workshops about Ursula Le Guin, June Jordan and Palestinian poetry, W.E.B. Du Bois and Saidiya Hartman and more. With my friend Tyler Morse, I led a workshop about Samuel Delaney’s Times Square Red/Times Square Blue, his two-in-one essay that acts both as a memoir of cruising in Times Square porn theaters and a reflection on “interclass contact” that is lost when urban spaces are socioeconomically flattened by capital.

I realized that the book is more widely-read now than when I had initially encountered it; it was published in 1999? but I didn’t read it until 2008, and multiple people younger than me told me they read it in a college class. (It was not on any syllabi I know of when I attended undergrad in the early aughts.)

Part of what resonated with me when I first read it was a sense that it described something off about NYC in the aughts when compared it to other cities I lived in during that decade; the sense of social striation felt much more intractable and inescapable in NYC. In theory, NYC is a city where everyone is forced into dense spaces with everyone else, across class. But in reality, the influx of incredible wealth to the city, the ascent of the real estate state, the fortification of “quality of life” policing, the shift from transplants as aspirants from a range of class backgrounds seeking low-rent and community to mostly middle class, upper-middle-class and wealthy children of means and a backdrop of skyrocketing rents meant the city did not feel like a place to me where people were encountering and building real relationships with anyone outside their class mileu. It was and is very much possible to have a busy social life in NYC and never once speak to anyone on SNAP or Medicaid, even though more than half of New Yorkers are on Medicaid and 20% are on SNAP.

The NYC of the 2000s I entered did not resemble anything like the NYC of the 60s, 70s or 80s which were still the popular media depiction of the city at the time, and Delaney’s book helped provide an explanation for why that did not deadend into nostalgia. In the book, Delaney befriends - and eventually develops a romantic relationship with an unhoused man living on the street, and he talks about some of some men frequenting porn theaters being homeless. (He is still in a relationship with the man he met on the street - Dennis - today.) Today more New Yorkers are homeless than ever, but nodes of solidarity, let alone friendships between people experiencing street homelessness and the city’s creative class are rare. Even NYC’s tenant movements feel mostly disconnected from homeless organizing, which is itself not as robust in NYC as it is in cities on the west coast. (This is partly because NYC’s “right to shelter” means, in theory, everyone who is homeless is legally granted shelter space, even if that isn’t exactly the case and Eric Adams has attempted to erode even those protections.)

If I ask myself what has changed since the aughts, it’s mainly that the affordability crisis and class striation now seem to be a universal problem; it’s not just NYC and LA, it’s Boise, Kansas City, St Louis, Denver.

But I also think this has led to a resurgence of working class-led movements and the re-emergence of tenant organizing - not just organizing facilitated by NGOs but autonomous movements - which represent cracks where the light can get in, indications that inequality can only maintain so much of a grasp on the city before it creates pressure points that can be mobilized.

Anyway the workshops were good. But I decided I’m only curating this workshop series again next year if people want to co-organize it with me. Email me if interested.

What I’m writing:

For WIRED I shared some documents I got through a FOIA request: the ground lease for Meta’s data center in Louisiana as well as the state’s economic development agreements with the company for what will likely be the largest data center in North America and one of the largest in the world by square footage. I found that the state did not get any binding guarantees about full time jobs in exchange for massive tax breaks (I also wrote about Meta’s data center for 404 Media in June, particularly its cost to energy customers. Since then, reporting has come out showing more evidence that data centers are causing energy bills to spike.)

For Next City and Shelterforce I wrote about a successful tenant strike in Los Angeles that got landlords to refund utility fee overcharges and lower tenants’ monthly bills, and why that isn’t enough. I wrote about housing measures that passed on November 4, including my take on NYC’s housing ballot measures. Many scientists are calling my take the only good take on this. I wrote about tenants of buildings in NYC owned by Pinnacle unionizing and going on rent strike.

Tin House Autumn Workshop:

I did something that I’ve wanted to do for a few years and which I’ve slowly been building myself toward in my free time; I attended a weekend-long online short story workshop hosted by Tin House. It was Tin House’s first workshop series dedicated to speculative fiction, which is really exciting! I wrote a new story just for the workshop, about a board game that transforms society during a period of colonization. The main feedback was that it had too much going on and too much plot to fit into a short story which yes was true. I’m going to re-write it after I’ve had some time to figure out what I want to do with it. I’m also thinking of self-publishing a different story as a zine next year what do you think?

What I’m listening to:

Dawn Richard/Spencer Zahn - Quiet in a World Full of Noise - Love Richard/Zahn’s first collaboration, Pigments, which told a story of a relationship building up and fizzling out. This album is softer, sadder and is thematically about home, mistakes, care and starting over. I think both albums are remarkable for fusing the textures of ambient music, string and percussive soundscapes with R&B vocals in way that feels spacious and ripples along the ranges of human emotion.

Advance Base - Horrible Occurrences Amazed at Owen Ashworth’s storytelling and consistency as a writer of little indie film micro-fictions as songs, 25 some-odd years into his career, which I’ve been following since 2003? My favorite songs here are a duology; “Little Stable Point Lighthouse,” about a girl whose boyfriend disappears after driving out to see a lighthouse, and the following song, “Andrew and Meaghan,” about a different girl who sees the man’s ghost years later.

Rosalía - LUX - This album is cool as hell, reminds me of El Mal Querer but instead of a quiet dark acoustic project, a melodramatic, maximalist jaunt with a full orchestra.

Greg Jamie - Across a Violet Pasture - This is my friend from high school who has a really nice singing voice

KeiyA - Hooke’s Law

Nobuhiri Okahashi - 12

Stevie Wonder - Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants (1979)

Nourished By Time - The Passionate Ones

Lido Pimienta - La Belleza

Annahstasia - Tether

Perera Elsewhere - Just Wanna Live Some

What I’ve been reading since September:

Myriam Gurba, Poppy State

Alejandro Varela, The People Who Report More Stress

Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Lost Ark Dreaming

Sarah Aziza, The Hollow Half

Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ash

Nick Estes, Our History is the Future

Samuel R. Delaney, Times Square Red/Times Square Blue (Re-Read)

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived In The Castle

Richard and Wendy Pini, Complete ElfQuest Volume 1

Bird of Paradigm, Dragonia

I loved this little self-published novelette by Bird of Paradigm, AKA Paradise Crustacean Entropy, a queer artist/designer/musician/DJ based in Los Angeles. It’s a meta interdimensional trans time travel murder mystery that is also an anxious journal of an authoritarian present. More people should self-publish sci-fi zines, I would buy them.

In con clusion

This has been a rough year for me financially and in terms of housing and I suppose it does not help that the country is on fire, but maybe it does help. Maybe it helps a lot! In February I moved out of my apartment in Jackson Heights because my landlord wanted to sell the condo unit. After months of putting my belongings in storage and looking for roommates on social media sites and lesbian dating apps (???) I eventually ended up moving to…Jackson Heights. Actually the postal address is technically Woodside, but there are two establishments on the block that have the word “Jackson Heights” in their name so I believe it is spiritually Jackson Heights. I spent part of the year trying to scheme a way to purchase an apartment but concluded that I need one million more dollars or for mortgage rates to soften. Unrelatedly if you want to pay for this newsletter next year the rates start at just one million dollars. That may seem like a lot but if just one of you subscribes, I will have one million dollars. If it helps I can rebrand as a provocateur battling the scourge of “wokeness” or whatever is profitable in this newsletter ecosystem. That’s one million dollars