A progressive congressional delegation has just returned from a historic trip to Latin America, where they met with three recently elected left-wing administrations in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Organized by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the group aimed to redefine the United States’ relationship with the region, and begin to repair (many) past wrongs.

Ocasio-Cortez was joined by Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) , Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), and Misty Rebik, Senator Bernie Sanders’s chief of staff.

Casar, the son of Mexican immigrants and a former labor organizer who was elected to the house in 2022, spoke with Mother Jones about his experience joining the delegation, and how the US needs to change its engagement with Latin America to address common goals of combating climate change, lifting up working people, and protecting democracy.

This is a different congressional delegation than has been sent to Latin America in the past. Could you talk about how you got involved? And how this group was a change of pace from our past relations with left-wing Latin American movements and governments?

This was a different kind of trip. Not only because it was all Latino members of Congress that went, not only because we were able to have almost all of our meetings in Spanish or Portuguese—but because it was entirely progressive members of Congress meeting with our newly elected progressive counterparts in Latin America. And in almost every meeting, Latin American leaders expressed how different of a delegation this was. Because instead of having conversations based on Cold War militarism—instead of having meetings that ignore past US interventionism in Latin America— our conversations were based on listening and mutual respect. I think that’s what was so important.

Tremaine Emory, the creative director of the clothing company Supreme, has left the post, claiming that he faced “systemic racism” at the company. In Instagram posts detailing his departure, Emory stated that he left over how Supreme handled a collaboration with the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa.

It wasn’t entirely clear what Jafa, who is best known for his 2016 film Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, was to produce for Supreme. It also wasn’t clear whether the Jafa project was moving forward or not.

Emory said on Instagram that “one of the few black employees” at Supreme had prevented the project from moving forward “because of the depiction of black men being hung and the freed slave gordon pictured with his whip lashes on his back.” This seems to be a reference to a photograph of an enslaved person that Jafa has periodically appropriated for his art. That image is owned by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the museum has retitled the work Peter (formerly identified as “Gordon”) to account for the subject’s historical misidentification. Emory’s Instagram stated the Jafa project had been “secretly shutdown without anyone talking to me.”

In a statement to Business of Fashion, Supreme said that the Jafa project “has not been canceled.” The company explained that it “strongly” disagreed with what it called “Tremaine’s characterization” of the events preceding his departure. Emory said in his Instagram that this statement was a “lie to hide the systemic racism that lies deep within supreme and almost all white Owned corporations.”

Through a representative, Jafa declined to comment to ARTnews. Supreme did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The British Museum in London has appointed Carl Heron as its interim deputy editor after Jonathan Williams “stepped back” from the position after reports that the institution’s management ignored warnings about stolen and missing items from its collection.

The museum’s chairman, George Osborne, informed the institution’s staff about the appointment in an email, according to the Daily Telegraph, which first reported the news. Osborne said Heron would be in the position on a temporary basis, and called him a “highly-respected authority within the museum.”

Heron has worked at the museum since 2016 as its director of scientific research, a role funded by the London-based health research foundation the Wellcome Trust. Prior to the British Museum, Heron was the head of archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford, where his work focused on identifying ancient organic matter preserved in association with archaeological materials.

The announcement from Osborne means Heron is effectively the interim leader of the British Museum after Hartwig Fischer resigned as director on August 25. Fischer had previously announced in July he would be stepping away from the position in 2024.

Three hours after Fischer’s resignation, the British Museum also announced that Williams would be voluntarily stepping back from his position. The press statement followed several news reports that Dutch art dealer and art historian Ittai Gradel had tried to contact Fischer, Williams, and Osborne about his concerns that the institution’s artifacts were appearing on eBay in 2021.

A spate of cultural vandalism continued earlier this year when part of a buried Stone Age monument in Wales was crudely excavated and left to the elements.  

Julian Baker, a 52-year-old man from Abertridwr, Caerphilly, filmed himself unearthing the 4,500-year-old relic on Eglwysilan mountain and posted the video to Facebook, according to local heritage officials. In a first prosecution of its sort in Wales, Baker has been ordered to pay £4,400 (roughly $5,600) for its restoration. Additionally, he was given a four-month custodial sentence, suspended for two years, at the Magistrates Court in Wales, according to the BBC. 

The buried monument is two large sandstones with “enigmatic” cup marks carved into their surface. Experts guess that the stones “may have acted as route markers or demarcated territorial boundaries.” In the video, Baker roughly separates a panel of rock art from the stone.

Baker was charged with executing “unauthorized work affecting a scheduled monument” and acting to “destroy or damage an ancient protected monument”.

“This damage is a serious incident at a rare class of prehistoric monument in Wales,” a spokesperson for Welsh government heritage body Cadw told the BBC. “Significant archaeological information has been lost forever, and although some evidence may remain, the significance and value of the part of the monument damaged has been significantly diminished. We welcome the court’s decision in this case, the first we have submitted under section 28 of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979.”

It was the full-body ache of our hangovers and the cigarette smoke stagnating in our hair that compelled us toward the pond. We were sat in the debris of a house party, on a sofa that had recently doubled as an ashtray, when Janique said we should go for a swim. I suggested the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, which is free of men and harsh chemicals. 

There are five ponds in a row on the eastern edge of Hampstead Heath. They run (from south to north): the Highgate No. 1 Pond, the Highgate Men’s Pond, the Model Boating Pond, the Bird Sanctuary Pond, and, finally, set slightly apart from the others and sheltered by trees, the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. It is accessed by a long path, behind a gate with a sign that reads WOMEN ONLY / MEN NOT ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT. There are two holding pens off to the side of the path, one for chaining bicycles, the other for chaining dogs. There is no pen for young children, who are not (unlike dogs and bicycles) allowed past even the first gate. As we walked through the park, I regaled my North American companion with the pond’s lore: 

The women’s pond is “a transporting haven” with a “wholesomely escapist quality” (Sharlene Teo). To swim in its “clean, glassy,” (Ava Wong Davies) “velvety water” (Esther Freud) is to “enter a new state” (Lou Stoppard)! (All of this comes from the 2019 essay collection At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond, in which every piece contains the verb to glide.)

We arrived at the meadow, which, I assured Janique, is a haven of nakedness. On this particular afternoon, as we sat in the sun to change, I noticed that I was the only person who was actually naked. 

Hurricane Idalia struck Florida 190 miles north of Tampa on Wednesday as a Category 3 storm, a classification that causes “devastating” damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. With 125-mile-per-hour winds upon landfall, it fell just short of the Category 4 metric.

This region of Florida hasn’t seen such strong wind gusts and storm surges in more than 125 years. Many roads are flooded, with water levels up to at least 8 feet. 

“We have multiple trees down, debris in the roads, do not come,” posted the fire and rescue department of Cedar Key, an island connected to the mainland by bridges. There, water levels are at least 6.5 feet high. “We have propane tanks blowing up all over the island.”

“Our entire downtown is submerged,” one local resident, Michael Bobbitt, wrote on Facebook. “Houses everywhere are submerged.”

Elsewhere in the sunshine state, fallen trees have hit gas lines, and hundreds of thousands of people are without electricity as of Wednesday afternoon.

I seem to find a reason to go to CVS several times a week. Sometimes these reasons are medical, but much of the time, I am tracking down some household item or another—especially when I need something faster than it can be delivered, or I don’t want to be party to the low-level violence of same-day delivery, and I don’t feel like subjecting myself to the psychic keelhauling of a Target run. There is a unique air of desperation to most CVS locations. This is probably because CVS, as a health-care company stapled to a convenience store chain, blends the special emotional terroirs of the hospital and the gas station snack aisle. It could also be because the stores are often seriously understaffed, presumably in part due to the corporation’s recent move to slash pharmacy hours at thousands of locations. The decor is what you might call austerity-core. It is both corporate-loud (garish displays of next season’s decorations) and minimalist-clinical (pilled gray carpeting, fluorescent lights). People in pain and in search of relief, people picking up the prescriptions they need to live, and people who really want a soda all stalk the aisles.

The one unalloyed delight of CVS, though, is the soundtrack. One of the first things you notice once you start paying attention to the in-store music is how much whoever is in charge of programming loves Rod Stewart. “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on, sugar, tell me so,” Rod demands as you ponder the locked cases of flu medicine. “Young hearts, be free tonight,” Rod bellows while you compare the prices of soap. Sometimes he hides behind an additional layer of mediation, as in Sheryl Crow’s version of “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” a song also notably covered by Rod. These are not the sexiest Rod songs. In fact, they are the songs where he sings from a place of impotence or regret. His lover threatens to crush him; she is too impossible to talk to; love will tear them apart. Like the shoppers whose attention the in-store loudspeaker announcements periodically try to seize, she is to be guilted, cajoled.

Big feelings reign on the CVS soundtrack. Sometimes they are overheated. Other times they are gushy, like the Sixpence None the Richer cover of “There She Goes,” the heroin anthem by the La’s, jacked up a treacly minor third from the original. (There are lots of covers on the playlist.) The emoting has a tendency to ambush you. Earlier this week I was picking up trash bags when, all of a sudden, I heard the distinctive plunk-plink-plunk-plink-plunk-plink-plunk-plink of the sad-sack opening guitar riff to “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol. The song depicts a couple, secure, or maybe trapped, in a bubble of self-sufficiency: “We don’t need anything or anyone.” While Rod sometimes sounds like he is delivering his come-ons with a campy wink, “Chasing Cars” contains no prophylactic against its own sentimental excess. It is an almost unbearable song to hear in CVS, regardless of the circumstances that bring you into the store. “If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lay with me and just forget the world?” the chorus goes. Here?

The basic experience of shopping at CVS is one of doing something desperate at worst and banally unpleasant at best while swimming in a warm bath of muted musical intensity. No other retail chain is so committed to the power ballad as a musical form. A Spotify playlist of “CVS BANGERS,” apparently sourced from hard-won knowledge, features a stacked lineup: Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is”; Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight”; the Cars’ “Drive”; Toto’s still-inescapable “Africa.” One song on that playlist that I absolutely have heard in my local store is Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”—the nineties adult-alternative equivalent of a power ballad, a spoken/sung tale of a marriage crumbling under the weight of too much gender. Some philosophers claim that the emotions artworks evoke are really “pseudo emotions”; we feel them at one degree of remove. I can think of no better support for this thesis than the experience of listening to Paula Cole in CVS. The hopes of young love, the disappointments of middle age, the curdling resentment that ensues: I feel some inkling of it all. But mostly I’m just tapping my foot as I wait to pick up my prescription.

Sweet, sweet Carabao! It was the second round of the League Cup last night and today Marcus, Luke, Andy and Jim are loving Marco Silverware instead after Fulham overcame Ange-ball at the Cottage.

The lads then also speculate whether Fizzer is destined for the Canada job and they have an important message for Elon Musk… “Buy Manchester United!”

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Yanet Candelario could feel her body grow tense as she remembered some of her experiences during the 13 months she spent at the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. A dual citizen of Canada and Cuba, holding a placard that asked, “Why is Biden Siding With a Private Prison Co.?” she had joined dozens of other advocates outside the Clarkson S. Fisher Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Trenton, New Jersey, to demand the closure of the state’s oldest and last remaining immigrant prison. “I remembered the toxicity and the pain I saw in that place,” Candelario says. She had been sent to the detention center after returning from a trip to Panama in 2016, while her application for lawful permanent status was pending. “It’s a place of destruction, really,” she adds. 

Today the facility houses an average of about 160 migrants a day—both men and women—and is run by CoreCivic on a contract with US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that was set to expire on August 31. The future of the detention center has been under litigation for several months. On August 14, US District Court Judge Robert Kirsch heard arguments in a case about a 2021 state law signed by Gov. Phil Murphy that barred public and private entities from entering, renewing, or extending contracts with ICE to detain immigrants.

On Tuesday, Judge Kirsch issued a ruling siding with CoreCivic. “The result of any one of New Jersey’s neighboring states passing a comparable law—let alone an ensuing domino effect to other states—would result in nothing short of chaos,” he wrote, adding that “the statute is a dagger aimed at the heart of the federal government’s immigration enforcement mission and operations.” The ruling paves the way for ICE and CoreCivic to renew their contract and for immigrants to continue being detained in the Elizabeth Detention Facility.

We are disappointed with today’s ruling, which we view as interfering with NJ’s right to protect its residents. Private detention facilities threaten the public health and safety of New Jerseyans, including when used for immigration purposes. We will be appealing this decision.

— Attorney General Matt Platkin (@NewJerseyOAG) August 29, 2023

On June 14, 1862, the New York Times published an editorial titled “The Mystery of Negrophilism.” The essay questioned the origins of white Americans’ “extraordinary interest in the negro” and called the “passion for the American negro” an “entirely abnormal…phenomenon.” During the Antebellum period, Southerners pathologized Northern whites’ intolerable friendliness—their “liking negroes”—as “negrophilism.” They chided abolitionists as “negro-maniacs” obsessed with “negro interest.” It was untenable for citizens of a slaveholding nation to harbor human affection toward enslaved descendants of Africa—a continent, the author wrote (purportedly quoting then–Secretary of State William Seward), that “nature had fortified against civilization.” White enslavers positioned enslaved Black people as chattel partly by excluding them from the emotional bonds that facilitate civil society.

“Negrophile” sentiment had the power to make Black suffering legible and, as a result, Black American humanity legible too. In the white South, where Black flesh demarcated a non-human species, negrophilia was a deleterious liberal ideology that reimagined the natural (white) order of the world. For White Americans to espouse sympathy towards un-sympathizable Blacks, and acknowledge their suffering, was to blaspheme against a long-held doctrine that justified chattel slavery by excluding Black people from fellow feeling: Black suffering is permissible because it is deserved. The South’s paranoia around negrophilism spurred violent inquisitions that snuffed out traces of “negrophile” doctrines like abolition from the crevices of Southern life. Negrophiles were prosecuted, flogged, and ostracized. Negrophile educators were exiled from schools, and “negrophile books” were banned throughout the South or sent to the pyre.

Contemporary supporters of so-called “woke” doctrines have endured the same treatment—but referring to white Americans as negrophiles is unacceptable by today’s social standards, which forbid any suggestion of the “N-word.” The right has supplanted the epithet with what it now derides as “wokeness,” reviving the Southern notion of negrophilia as a righteous fixation on race. As a pejorative, “woke” isn’t too distant from its predecessors: race agitator, nigger-lover, negrophile. A “woke” white person—a negrophile—threatens to indoctrinate fellow whites into liberal obsession with racism. The irony was captured in 1962 by a self-proclaimed “negrophile”: “One wonders whether this term in either its genteel or vulgar form would ever be applied to another human being except by somebody who was, perhaps, subconsciously, a negrophobe.”

Frantz Fanon, a psychologist from the French Antilles, described negrophobia in his Black Skin, White Masks as “a neurosis characterized by the anxious fear” of Black people or, by extension, of Blackness at large. “In the phobic, affect has a priority that defies all rational thinking,” Fanon writes, “For the object, naturally, need not be there. It is enough that somewhere it exists: It is a possibility.” As Fanon suggests, negrophobia is irrational; it must be tirelessly manufactured.

Conservatives’ fanaticism around “wokeness” also has no anchor in logic, no real definition, and must also be fabricated ad nauseam. Like the southern phobia around negrophilism, the phobia of wokeness is malicious, yet sensible—for the anti-woke, who are paranoid that a society saturated with racial sympathy would turn on a “negro axis.” The possibility of a Black sociopolitical orientation, as Fanon said, causes “fear and revulsion.”