Capitalism drives all human interaction away from affection toward profit motive. In the age of dating apps which function as virtual “people stores”, consumer mentality has caused individuals to be commodified into “personality packages” meant for consuming and discarding upon whim (ultimately leading to feelings of dissatisfaction for the user and the used); and in this sense radical egalitarians, within feminism and wider leftism, who seek to bring about the end of romantic love find within the monstrous economic system a strange bedfellow.

First poem, published in Outlaw Poetry on October 13th.

Submitted to DSA’s magazine Democratic Left on August 20th.

Russell Edwards is an entrepreneur, author, historian, and licensed psychotherapist from Regent’s University, London (2017). Between 2007-2014, Russell dedicated a considerable amount of his time and financial resources to solving the infamous “Jack the Ripper” case, and out of that experience came his book Naming Jack The Ripper. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Russell about his journey, both in revealing the identity of a notorious serial killer and then writing about it.

There is nothing which quite so painfully emphasizes the difference between being alive and being dead than a bustling shopping mall sitting directly across the street from a giant cemetery. But perhaps the contrast only exists in the mind of a white Western man after coming up in a culture steeped in nearly three centuries of naturalist Enlightenment thought. Because for the residents in Buenos Aires (and, frankly, the rest of South and Central America) the barrier between this world and a world of the shadows has never been a concrete wall, but more like a curtain which the winds of mystery occasionally blow open so that both sides may interact. Altars are built for the dead, prayers are said to them, and festivals are held in their honor and with their attendance in mind. While fellow non-believers may see such activities as pointless, I beg to differ. These cultural rituals and perceptions provide amazing catharsis, and are uniquely powerful ways of keeping passed loved ones alive... if only in our hearts.

Love—at first—if it is true, must be a total loss of agency. If love is true, it must first be a form of madness so violent that it is capable of temporarily destroying the person who feels it if it is unrequited and of lifting that same person up into a state of near-transcendence and ecstasy if it is returned. To say that love must be a “forever fever” would, of course, be unrealistic and idiotic. But there cannot be any denying that love must begin as a fever in order to make the hard work that follows doable and worthwhile. This can make life very complicated because—as most of us know—it is possible to fall in love more than once, it is possible to fall in love with more than one person at the same time, and it's also possible to falsely believe one is in love when one in fact is not. And yet, no matter how we choose to approach the feeling (or fever) of romantic love in our lives, the question still remains of how exactly to “do the work” of love after the fire turns to ember.