An emergency podcast on the escalating pandemic crisis in Indonesia. Dr Sana Jaffrey is the new director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), the organisation founded by Sidney Jones in Jakarta. She is also a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC., for whom she is writing about Indon…

In this episode we speak to Ian Wilson (@iwilson69) about his research of over a decade on the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), an Islamist group that challenges Indonesia’s democratic status quo. We talk about how to distinguish the FPI from other militant groups and Ian explains his concept of “morality racketeering”. We end by covering some curious gan…

I have been the storyteller of my dad’s non-Hodgkins, mantle-cell lymphoma since he was diagnosed in early 2019 to his extended community of friends and family. It’s a difficult story for me to tell. It requires delicacy, nuance, and just the right amount of revelation and firmness to share it in a way where everyone knows enough information and (hopefu…

Note: This is the fourth post in a new series I am now titling [Jason’s] Unfolding Queer Cosmology. The name has changed to better reflect the specificity of the Queer Cosmology. It is [mine]. [I] references that it also is not mine alone. Read “The First Post” here.

Vlog: Art Camp for Comrades!

A note: This post talks frankly about bullying and queerness. This autumn my dad asked me to start a project with him. I suggested we write letters to each other based on how he used to write me cards as a kid. We’ve sent a few back and forth. It’s been beautifully healing.

A note: This post talks frankly about bullying and queerness. This autumn my dad asked me to start a project with him. I suggested we write letters to each other based on how he used to write me cards as a kid. We’ve sent a few back and forth. It’s been beautifully healing.

Image description: The QUEERSPELL logo. I was born Catholic and named Jason, which means “Healer,” so I’ve always been drawn to ritual and to the larger questions in life. In fact, I’ve been on a quest to discover more and more about who I be, who I have been, and who I want to be.

Vlog: Art Update

Chit Chat is a video interview series where an artist-comrade and I shoot the shit about our art, values, practices, and praxis for 30 to 60 minutes. There will be uproarious laughter, cursing like a sailor, idle chatter, and maybe even a tear or two. Consider it a love letter between two friends about how we collectively get free.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: As you’ve no doubt heard, on Day One of his presidency, Biden put a temporary moratorium on all leasing-related activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Couple this with an unprecedented public response against opening the coastal plain to oil drilling during the comment period in December, a commitment by a…

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Following President Biden’s day-one temporary order to halt oil and gas activity on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Federal house and senate lawmakers, working across the aisle, introduced legislation to permanently protect the coastal plain

The dogs barreled out of the house, barking as if they meant it. Mama moose, fearing for her calf, charged out of the garden, strait through the fence and the bird feeders, in a bee-line for her calf. The wire fencing crumpled, birdseed flew, and the feeders lay upended on the ground.

The Future We Make This issue of News Watch features several videos including A Message From the Future (which came out before the pandemic). This upbeat YouTube video is a message about the future we want to make and the Green New Deal narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A follow-up video came out mid-pandemic and is entitled

With 13 active oil and gas leases already located in Cook Inlet, a million acres in new lease sales has the potential to turn the Lower Cook Inlet into an industrial zone. For many Alaskans that collective sigh of relief when a gridlocked Congress finally adopted the Inflation Reduction Act was short-lived. On the one hand, the Act includes $369 billion …

Steady boys walk on Our work is nearly done No more we’ll till or plow the fields The horses’ day is gone And this will be our last trip home So, study boys walk on The excerpt above is from a song by Scottish singer-songwriter Dick Gaughan about the end of an era of draft horses that pulled plows to ready the fields for planting These majestic beasts were re…

On the one-year anniversary of the insurrection, tens of thousands of Americans across race, place, party, and backgroundshowed up in strength by participating in 350 “January 6th – Day of Remembrance and Action Vigils” across the country. I find it disheartening that we’ve reached the point where our democracy is so vulnerable we have to hold rallies i…

Preventing development from diverting instream flows critical for fish and wildlife habitat is exactly what the instream flow reservation is intended to do. The Department of Natural Resources has been suspiciously quiet regarding its plan to overhaul Alaska’s water regulations. Under

Because northern latitudes are warming almost three times as fast as the rest of the globe, Alaska’s ecosystems are beginning to unravel. To their credit, almost 50 years ago, the Alaska legislature had the foresight to establish state critical habitat areas, parks and wilderness

Gardeners in Alaska know that it’s hard to grow big, juicy tomatoes here. But as the climate rapidly warms in the far north, that could change. Anchorage reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) for the first time on record in 2019. Arctic sea ice is rapidly receding, and average annual temperatures are 3-4 F higher statewide (1.7-2.2 C) compar…

There is nothing like the experience of paddling across the Bay on a beautiful sunny day with the Kenai Mountain range as your windshield. Kachemak Bay is a gem among the Kenai Peninsula’s recreational destinations. My most recent emersion into the perfect mixture of mountains and water that form the Kachemak Bay Watershed was last month when friend Todd…

The Good News Given the initial number of applicants to the Restaurant Revitalization Fund during its first two days, with businesses seeking nearly $70B, it wasn’t a matter of if, but rather, how senators and house representations would pursue additional funding.

Before the final bell rang for the day, Sister Agnes enlisted a couple of the older children to carry more than a decades worth of yearbooks from the school library over to the parish house. With the local news providing ambient noise, she studied each 3rd grade class looking for the face from the previous night. The news anchor reported a story of drug…

A cold December wind whipped across the brick-iron apartment complex, catching me in the face like a left hook. In the receding daylight, the buildings looked respectable for middle-class families, though it had started to show its age. Originally designated section-8 back in the mid-90s, it had been remodeled in the past decade like most of the metropl…