Logic(s)

Ginjo, Jimma, Oromia Region, Ethiopia. Courtesy of the author. This essay is part memoir, quarterly report, love letter and mourning. I hope it provides context for the challenges and successes we have faced as an organization since re-launching as Logic(s) plural in 2022. This marks the end of our brief hiatus, in addition to digitally publishing pieces commissioned for issue 24, we are launching a podcast this fall.

1/ When the pandemic first struck the United States, it was not uncommon to hear people compare its virality to the other, online, kind. The numbers climbed impossibly—then inevitably—high. In a nightmare inversion of network effects, the more people who got it, the more deadly it became. In New York City ICUs, patients were dying in the hallways. Then, as the weeks passed, a different technological metaphor started to seem more apt: the X-ray.

1/ The internet says that the word “pivot” may refer to a point of rotation in a lever system, a chemicals and explosives manufacturer in Australia, an open source platform for building applications in Java, one of three joints in the human body, a piece of syntax, a dance move. A dancer might pivot on one heel or on the heels of both hands, depending on the dance in question. The internet says so many things.

While the history of redlining and its impact on American cities has received due attention in recent years, contemporary observers have tended to overlook a similarly widespread practice: the encoding of racially restrictive covenants onto property deeds. The community-driven project Hacking into History (HiH) has, since 2020, sought to rectify this by narrating the impact of racial covenants in Durham, North Carolina.

pretty much my first career: to take Friday’s horror & make it Wednesday humor the swelling had ended & so the laughter could bloat on the porch, only kin of bloodlock & marriage-bed James, you just drunk just like her, akimbo & decades tired in her tone just drunk! i don’t understand! do grandma again, nezzy! just drunk! what made me weep & hide & fist-in-his-back weekends now was my currency of cute, a requested delight Go to hell, Barbara! Just go to hell! & how papa be lookin, neno?

I hadn’t anticipated the heat. One expects a logistics warehouse to be cavernous, imposing, even noisy—the constant rumble of carts blending with the whir of conveyors. But the warm air sticking to my skin in this Amazon fulfillment center, kicked out by the heavy sorting machinery lining the warehouse floor, takes me unawares.

The oil and gas industry dug hundreds of miles of canals throughout South Louisiana last century. Photo: Xander Peters, 2023. On an early spring afternoon, our small-engine seaplane banks sharply as it traces the southeastern Louisiana shoreline.

Telema? I’ve been waiting for ages for you to call! How was your trip? What’s Obiowo like? Did you manage to find the family land? I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. It’s been … overwhelming. Aniedi explained what had happened, and Telema listened intently, humming at intervals. Well, what’re you going to do, then? I’m not sure. What exactly do the voices want you to do? They spoke a lot about … remembering. They spoke about my family … so many things I didn’t know. Things I couldn’t have known.

Paromita Shah is a cofounder and the executive director of Just Futures Law, an organization that uses litigation, policy, and advocacy to combat the surveillance of Black and Brown communities, provide legal defense for immigrant organizers, and dismantle the detention, deportation, and criminalization of immigrant communities. We discuss what it means to use the law for abolitionist work.

Well, officer, the trouble really start when Mr. Vincent dead. I shouldn’t have been surprise, eh. My neighbor wasn’t studying he health at all. He was only in he sixties, so he spend a lot of time in the bar down by the football field quarrelling over politics and All Fours games. He had plenty money to lime in Boysie Bar after he wife pass because he used to work as a manager in the biscuit factory up Mt. Lambert, and then he children went America and get government job.