The Ohiomachine

FORTHCOMING Fall 2025

Ohio is the geographical no-place that you fly over to get from one coast to the other. Wedged into a vast geographical space known simply as “the American Midwest,” Ohio is a flat, dull, boring space in which someone — no one knows who — grows corn. It is just a dull place where nothing[…]

The Fight for Black Liberation: Breaking the Political Strings in the Trump Era

FORTHCOMING Winter 2025

The first presidency of Donald J. Trump further unveiled the calamity of white America’s determination to maintain societal order during a period of landmark racial upheaval. From the death of George P. Floyd Jr. and the subsequent summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the winter 2021 insurrection, and the restrictive voting measures led by Republicans[…]

Evil Twins and the Ultimate Insight: Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and the Polarized Politics of Reading

Published: 10/05/2023

With the 2020 election, political polarization in the U.S. entered a ludicrous end-stage. Partisanship, once a pseudo-rational system of biases, has devolved to a conflict between incompatible realities. In search of some pathway toward consensus, Evil Twins and the Ultimate Insight: Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and the Polarized Politics of Reading looks to the works[…]

Why the Center Can’t Hold: A Diagnosis of Puritanized America

Published: 05/30/2016

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” These words from Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” provide Why the Center Can’t Hold with its organizing theme. And although Yeats was describing the grim atmosphere of post-World War I Europe, O’Neill regards the poem’s pronouncements as eerily predictive of the state of the world as we are[…]

Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics

Published: 12/10/2015

READ Lester Spence on how he conceptualized this book as a sort of critical response to Cornel West’s Race Matters and David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and why he chose punctum books as his publisher, HERE. Over the past several years scholars, activists, and analysts have begun to examine the growing divide between[…]