Co-authored with Artie Vierkant. Forthcoming October 2022 from Verso Books.

Pre-order Health Communism

Co-authored with Artie Vierkant. Over the course of the pandemic it has been popular to claim that we have “learned lessons from COVID,” as though this plague has spurred a revolution in how we treat illness, debility, and death under capitalism. Part of the Petrie Flom Center Symposium on Health Law and Policy in an Era of Mass Suffering.

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Health justice scholar Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with historian Jules Gill-Peterson about anti-trans policy, eugenics, and the material stakes of desire. Read here.

The debate about mask mandates is actually a debate about the human, social and economic rights of everyone, not just the medically vulnerable. It is a conversation about the value that our society wishes to place in protecting each other from sickness, about the value of recognizing or rejecting our interdependence, and about the worth of the people whose suffering may soon be minimized as “deaths pulled from the future” or merely the “cost” of reopening. Read here.

Co-authored with Artie Vierkant. Years of optimistic predictions, emphasis on personal responsibility, and reductive assumptions about individual risk have calcified into a set of positions now held by many of the most prominent voices on COVID. But the talking points hawked by “respectable” pundits are largely indistinguishable from the worst views held by COVID deniers, minimizers, and cranks. Read here.

Our inability to mitigate COVID is not simply an issue of ‘politics’ in public health, vaccine hesitancy, and pandemic fatigue—it is also income inequality, incarceration, racism, ableism, generations of hoarded wealth, monopolistic corporations, and many other forces which drive the failure and death we have been living with since March 2020. Read here.

A Marxist approach to impairment, disablement, and chronic illness under capitalism. The money model is an important and understudied model of disability alike in use, but quite distinct in politics from the other more widely-known and used models of disability. Read here.

Co-authored with Artie Vierkant. As COVID continues, pharmaceutical companies increasingly assume forms of public statecraft. Rather than working to undo the harms of a vastly inequitable international vaccine rollout, the U.S. may instead use this opportunity to cement the significant advances pharmaceutical capital has managed over the last year. Read here.

We can't view Britney as an anomaly; the mental health system is designed to chemically and physically incarcerate people. An argument for abolition and disability justice. Read here.

Medicare Advantage is a fundamentally corrupt, parasitic institution. We must fully abolish the industry of private health insurance—severing the parasite from its host. Read here.

It’s a story of complicated administrative tasks, denials, barriers, and plain old cruelty to help understand just what we make disabled people go through to receive barer-than-the-bare-minimum help. Read here.

This essay examines the concept of sanism through the lens of what Liat Ben-Moshe calls “carceral sanism” and questions how the concept of danger and safety are employed in the cultural imaginary to conjure up ideas about madness. Read here.

The Sopranos is about not a crisis of masculinity but a crisis of capitalism. This classic early-prestige drama is actually about a one-man welfare state. Read here.

Drug companies want you to think they're providing glimmers of hope to terminally ill patients. Don't believe them. Read here.

Health finance issues are always labor issues, and what might seem at face to be harmless lobbying for simple rule changes at CMS can have catastrophic consequences for both workers and patients. Read here.

It’s clear from his platform that Bernie Sanders understands that people with disabilities are confronted with daily acts of discrimination and oppression in the United States. A Sanders presidency would offer an unprecedented chance to improve the lives of disabled people across the country. Read here.

The first in a three part series; discussing the ways in which aesthetics and fashion are used to control — to create borders between the “we” and “not we” — to mark who is important to capital and who is not. Read here.

Second in a three part series; the classically convention-breaking Cardin silhouette is a perfectionist fantasy which raises larger questions about fashion’s ability to reproduce a powerful kind of social and physical discomfort. Read here.

Beyond his interventions in womenswear, which were numerous, Pierre Cardin is widely credited with “inventing” the contemporary menswear market, or la mode masculine, and also with developing, designing, marketing, and selling some of the first “unisex” luxury fashions starting with his groundbreaking Cosmocorps collection. Read here.