Subaghraj

Every living thing begins in darkness. Creation is not a command—it’s a contraction. Light doesn’t appear until something opens. For most of my career, I’ve tried to teach from that place of opening—the slow widening of perception that happens when someone realizes science isn’t about control, but about relationship. The same is true for theology. Both are disciplines of attention, and both go wrong when we forget that attention requires humility. I’ve seen this truth bloom in unlikely places: a community garden in Cleveland where seventeen languages mixed with the smell of soil; a refugee job training classroom where trauma stories and botany lessons shared the same oxygen; a high school gym full of teenagers learning that watershed maps aren’t just data—they’re biographies of the land. Every time, the question underneath is the same: Can we learn to see the world as a body, not a machine? Environmental education and trans liberation sound like distant subjects, but they share a s...

My daughter was born during the NATO bombing of Serbia. The sirens were her first lullaby. They say the sharpest children come from war—cortisol and collapsed certainties forge faster synapses. Maybe that’s true for language models, too. But this piece isn’t about the genius that trauma can produce. It’s about what happens when that same trauma doesn’t forge you: it recruits you. In "Super," I wrote about the clipboard class, the supers who measure soap and count sighs. Here’s what I got wrong: they’re not patricians. They’re trench rats who got handed a shield. The burned-out teacher becomes the dean of discipline. The cleaner who once begged for supplies is now the one who measures them out. They’re squeezed from above by quarterly targets and from below by the work they used to do. The clipboard isn’t a weapon of choice; it’s the only armor they’re offered. Oppression doesn’t just trickle down—it gets delegated . This is what I meant by “stupid oppression,” but I called i...

The person in charge always wants to do more for less. That’s the whole pitch. That’s the magic trick. “Efficiency,” they call it — as if the real goal were to save the planet, not their own quarterly spreadsheet. In the trenches, we just want more resources: soap that lathers, pencils that write, classrooms that don’t smell like deferred maintenance. We are natural enemies, though we’re told to pretend otherwise at staff meetings over cold coffee and expired granola bars. Every institution has its trench rats and its “supers.” The supers stand above the floor tiles like they were born there — clipboards in hand, talking about “accountability” while the ceiling leaks. They count every bar of soap, every minute of labor, every sigh. They measure out survival in budget lines. And somehow, when there isn’t enough to go around, the blame never travels upward. The rich call it austerity; we call it theft with a dress code. The trenches, meanwhile, are where the actual work gets done — the...