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I probably agree with this person, but the prose is frustrating, meandering, aimless gibberish.

"But this is how mushrooms experience the world"? Yeah, well I'm not a fucking mushroom, am I?

God.

1) "What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk, and if I'm really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back into my senses, not just—like flowers—through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy."

2) "Matsutake are wild mushrooms that live in human-disturbed forests. Like rats, raccoons, and cockroaches, they are willing to put up with some of the environmental messes humans have made. Yet they are not pests; they are valuable gourmet treats—at least in Japan, where high prices sometimes make matsutake the most valuable mushroom on earth. Through their ability to nurture trees, matsutake help forests grow in daunting places. To follow matsutake guides us to possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance. This is not an excuse for further damage. Still, matsutake show one kind of collaborative survival."

3) "For living things, species identities are a place to begin, but they are not enough: ways of being are emergent effects of encounters."

4) "[Contaminated] diversity is recalcitrant to the kind of 'summing up' that has become the hallmark of modern knowledge. Contaminated diversity is not only particular and historical, ever changing, but also relational. It has no self-contained units; its units are encounter-based collaborations. Without self-contained units, it is impossible to compute costs and benefits, or functionality, to any 'one' involved. No self-contained individuals or groups assure their self-interests oblivious to the encounter. Without algorithms based on self-containment, scholars and policymakers might have to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake. That takes time, and too much time, perhaps, for those who dream of grasping the whole in an equation. But who put them in charge?"

5) "Freedom/haunting: two sides of the same experience. Conjuring a future full of pasts, a ghost-ridden freedom is both a way to move on and a way to remember. In its fever, picking escapes the separation of persons and things so dear to industrial production. The mushrooms are not yet alienated commodities; they are effects of the pickers' freedom. Yet this scene only exists because the two-sided experience has purchase in a strange sort of commerce. Buyers translate freedom trophies into trade through dramatic performances of 'free market competition.' Thus market freedom enters freedom's jumble, making the holding in abeyance of concentrated power, labor, property, and alienation seem strong and effective."

6) "Can matsutake as an economic product be managed sustainably? This question takes shape within the history of Forest Service efforts at timber management. In this history, nontimber forest products cannot be seen unless they make themselves compatible with timber. Thus the stand—the unit of manageable timber—is the basic landscape unit U.S. foresters can see. The fungal patch ecologies studied by Japanese scientists just do not register on this grid. The scale of U.S. forestry research on matsutake is adjusted accordingly. Some studies use random transects to sample matsutake on a scale that is compatible with timber stands. Others build models through which fungal patches can be scaled up. These studies devise monitoring techniques to make matsutake visible on the scale of timber's rationalization."

7) "To find a good mushroom, I need all my senses. For there is a secret to matsutake mushroom picking: one rarely looks for mushrooms."

8) "Sometimes common entanglements emerge not from human plans but despite them. It is not even the undoing of plans, but rather the unaccounted for in their doing that offers possibilities for elusive moments of living in common. This is the case for the making of private assets. Assembling assets, we ignore the common—even when it pervades the assembly. Yet the unnoticed, too, can be a site for potential allies."

9) "Bosses are embodiments of the entrepreneurial spirit. In contrast to earlier socialist dreams, they are supposed to make themselves, not their communities, wealthy. They dream of themselves as self-made men. Yet their autonomous selves bear comparison to matsutake mushrooms: the visible fruit of unrecognized, elusive, and ephemeral commons."

1) "Something moved me once. That's how all these stories begin for me. Some historical something, some fact or anecdote, came into my day—usually unannounced, over the radio, at a museum, in a text from a friend, on one of the seven hundred tabs open on my browser, or embedded in some larger work—and changed it. Somehow managed to cut through the whirr and sputter of life and moved me. Often I don't know why. That fascinates me."

2) "But scientists here on Earth couldn't signal back [to Mars]. They tried to think of a way. Global semaphore, someone proposed, would require flags the size of the state of Indiana and a flagpole that defied the laws of physics, not to mention handling procedures that would outstrip the capacity of even the most industrious Boy Scout troop. Contacting the Martians would take something else, another scientist suggested, something like draining Lake Superior, then filling it with gasoline and setting it on fire. The light could be seen from the surface of Mars, assuming folks there had a telescope at least as strong as Lowell's. But would they know it was a signal? Or would they just think we liked to set lakes on fire now and then?"

3) "There was the night she went dancing—she was twenty, and boys wanted to dance with her then, especially when she wore her red velvet dress—and one young man, tall and handsome, came up to talk to her. He told her how he wanted to be a scientist, a naturalist, and to study animals in Africa, and she asked him if he wanted to get out of there. They went down to the beach and the pier, where people like them didn't go, where there were honky-tonks and hot dog stands and the place where they spun sugar into cotton candy, and they wound up at this joint where they played jazz. They had never heard jazz before, but they soon found their rhythm, and they danced until the sun came up. Frances thanked the bandleader on her way out, saying that it had been the best night of her life. Three nights later, three nights after seeing her in her red velvet dress, Frederick Hamerstrom asked Frances to marry him. She asked what had taken him so long."

4) "To this day, historians debate whether Thomas Faunce's memory, at ninety-five, was accurate. And whether that specific rock—or any rock, for that matter—played any particular role in the Pilgrims' arrival. But it is clear that it didn't hold any real significance, practical or sentimental, to the Pilgrims themselves, because they basically wrote everything down, and no one ever mentioned it. Instead, the thing that makes this rock "Plymouth Rock" is poetry. There is something moving about this ninety-five-year-old man being moved. There's something romantic about the idea that this, right here, on this spot, this is where it all began. That is where it all began for the idea of Plymouth Rock, at least—when they built the wharf in a different spot and started to protect this rock and turn it into a relic, a symbol of freedom, a tie to a glorious past, an object worthy of veneration, and apparently of being dug up by a bunch of dudes gathered at the waterside to stick it to England."

5) "The cable didn't say how her husband had died. Neither did his obituary. A big one, in The New York Times, befitting the scion of a wealthy family, long familiar to the readers of the paper's society pages. William Hunter Harkness was a handsome Harvard man turned explorer, which was a type of guy in the early 1930s."

6) "It was 1839. He was sixty-four. During all the years he'd spent dragging Versailles around, trying to convince America that he was its greatest painter, he'd barely painted. He was rusty. And he knew it. So he went back to France, thinking that being there would inspire him, would help get him back to where he'd been before, to when he was young and everything felt so full of promise. He found that Versailles hadn't changed. The same mist from the same fountains in the same breeze, the same long shadows as the day grew late. But he had changed. As one does. He was heartbroken, he wrote, to be reminded of who he'd been those years before. A young American, standing in this garden, imagining painting this garden and all that painting this garden was going to bring."

7) "I like the new picture more. My grandparents as just two people figuring it out. It isn't the cover photo for some classic love story. It isn't love itself, but it may be life itself: one of those in-between moments you don't remember later. The in-between feelings you can't quite put a name to. The space between the story of our lives and those lives as we live them. I love that space and the magic that seems to exist in a place between and beyond concrete facts and the well-worn language of familiar stories. I love the spark that is kindled there, to flare just long enough to help us remember that life, in the present as in the past, is more complicated and more interesting and more beautiful and more improbable and more alive than we'd realized the moment before. That notion animates every story I try to write. I want to conjure the magic that lies in the liminal spaces between the plot points in people's lives."

8) "But here was Marconi near the end of his life, growing weaker and weaker with each heart attack. Dreaming of a device that would let him hear these lost sounds, that would let him tap in to these eternal frequencies. He would tell people that if he got it right, he would be able to hear Jesus of Nazareth giving the Sermon on the Mount. He would be able to hear everything that had ever been said. Everything he himself ever said. At the end of his life, he could sit in his piazza in Rome and hear everything that was ever said to him or about him. He could relive every toast and testimonial. We all could. Hear everything. Hear Marco Polo talk to Genghis Khan. Hear Shakespeare give an actor a line reading. Hear my grandmother introduce herself to my grandfather at a nightclub in Rhode Island. Hear someone tell you they love you, the first time they told you they loved you. Hear everything, forever."

1) "Recreational drugs are more or less traditional at any U.S. secondary school, maybe because of the unprecedented tensions: post-latency and puberty and angst and impending adulthood, etc. To help manage the intra-psychic storms, etc. Since the place's inception, there's always been a certain percentage of the high-caliber adolescent players at E.T.A. who manage their internal weathers chemically. Much of this is good clean temporary fun; but a traditionally smaller and harder-core set tends to rely on personal chemistry to manage E.T.A.'s special demands—dexedrine or low-volt methedrine before matches and benzodiazapenes to come back down after matches, with Mudslides or Blue Flames at some understanding Comm. Ave. nightspot or beers and bongs in some discreet Academy corner at night to short-circuit the up-and-down cycle, mushrooms or X or something from the Mild Designer class—or maybe occasionally a little Black Star, whenever there's a match- and demand-free weekend, to basically short out the whole motherboard and blow out all the circuits and slowly recover and be almost neurologically reborn and start the gradual cycle all over again..."

2) "Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again."

3) "'Uh oh. Dinnertime. Triangle's a-clangin' over in West.' 'Hey Hallie though? Hang on. Kidding aside for a second. What all do you know about Separatism?' Hal stopped for a moment. 'You mean in Canada?' 'Is there any other kind?'"

4) "The cable kabal's promise of 'empowerment,' the campaign argued, was still just the invitation to choose which of 504 visual spoon-feedings you'd sit there and open wide for. And so but what if, their campaign's appeal basically ran, what if, instead of sitting still for choosing the least of 504 infantile evils, the vox- and digitus-populi could choose to make its home entertainment literally and essentially adult? I.e. what if—according to InterLace—what if a viewer could more or less 100% choose what's on at any given time? Choose and rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands of second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non–'Happy Days' programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff, and c., all prepared by the time-tested, newly lean Big Four's mammoth vaults and production facilities and packaged and disseminated by InterLace TelEnt. in convenient fiber-optic pulses that fit directly on the new palm-sized 4.8-mb PC-diskettes InterLace was marketing as 'cartridges'? Viewable right there on your trusty PC's high-resolution monitor? Or, if you preferred and so chose, jackable into a good old premillennial wide-screen TV with at most a coaxial or two? Self-selected programming, chargeable on any major card or on a special low-finance-charge InterLace account available to any of the 76% of U.S. households possessed of PC, phone line, and verifiable credit? What if, Veals's spokeswoman ruminated aloud, what if the viewer could become her/his own programming director; what if s/he could define the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue?"

5) "Bob Death smiles coolly (South Shore bikers are required to be extremely cool in everything they do) and manipulates a wooden match with his lip and says No, not that fish-one. He has to assume a kind of bar-shout to clear the noise of his idling hawg. He leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away. The young biker leans back and smiles at Gately and gives an affable shrug and blatts away, a halter top's tits mashed against his back."

6) "The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify."

7) "It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America."

8) "This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, why they try so hard no matter what private troubles or issues or addictions they have of their own, why they seem to value your welfare above their own, and why there's always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obsessive mother-love: they're trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams."

9) "No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. What's real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed."

10) "'They'll have to move us around to different sites. It's a pain in the ass, but Schtitt's done it before. I think the real variable'll be whether the Québec kids got into Logan last night before whenever it was this hit.' 'Logan'll be shut down you're saying.' 'But I think we'd have heard if they got in last night. Freer and Struck were keeping tabs on an F.A.A. link ever since supper, Mario said.' 'Boys are looking to get X'd by some slow-witted hairy-legged foreign girls or what?' 'My guess is they're stuck up at Dorval. I'll bet C.T. is on the case even now. Get some sort of announcement at breakfast, probably.'em!"

11) "Something like a shadow flanked the vividness and lucidity of the world."

12) "It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than is its mongrel cousin. The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one's life, plunge in. I had researched this. Stice had asked whether I believed in ghosts. It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. Stice had promised something boggling to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning."

1) "Poetry may be playful in nature, but not all games feel poetic, and in my experience the videogames that feel most poetic are often those that have least in common with traditional games. My interest is not so much in considering poetry in light of play, but in considering (and making) videogames in light of poetry."

2) "Where fiction is concerned with what happens next, lyric poetry is concerned with what happens now."

3) "While we will be working toward a loose definition that might help us to identify and discuss 'game poems,' the point is not primarily to properly interpret or categorize these games, or get at their True Meaning, but rather to see if a close lyric reading can enhance our appreciation for any given game; whether considering these games as game poems can give us something to think about, something to talk about."

4) "Poetic address is one example of how lyric poems tend to exist in a kind of ritual space: they don't describe events so much as they exist to be events: to be performed and reperformed in what Muriel Rukeyser calls 'a ritual moment, a moment of proof.'"

5) "I have always thought of the game as a poem, and the original end-text as nothing more than a bit of context, but an explicit (and forced) indication of context always carries with it the danger of diminishing a poem's ambiguity and breaking the ritual moment on which lyric poetry tends to rely. [...] To illustrate my point: people have sometimes told me that Loneliness is a failure of a game because people cannot make sense of its central meaning without knowing the game's title."

6) "Following in the footsteps of literary theorist Stanley Fish, I would argue that categories like 'game poems' and 'digital poetry' are best thought of as related modes of paying attention rather than as objective taxonomical frameworks, and that every different mode of attention can offer us unique insights into the things we encounter."

7) "Conceived through the lens of lyric poetry that we have been utilizing, we might say that game poems are artifacts positioned as videogames that are short and subjective, make use of poetic address, exist in a ritual space, are hyperbolic, are bound to metaphor, and juxtapose signified meaning with material meaning (keeping in mind that, as in the case of lyric poetry, all of these characteristics are simply tendencies). We might summarize such a conception of game poems as 'videogames with lyric characteristics.'"

8) "From the videogame poet's standpoint, we might draw an analogy from a game's code to the ink that marks the page as a traditional poet writes down a poem on paper. The ink matters: it leaves a material trace that is relevant to the nature of poetry, and the words themselves cannot exist on the page without it; beyond this, the ink is deeply entangled with important questions of politics, economics, and ideology: where did it come from, how was it attained, what ideological structures are embedded with it on the page?"

9) "[From] the visual and auditory levels down to input mappings and operational logics, I seek to carve out new metaphors, recast established signifiers, and open avenues for new meaning. [...] Through this kind of use of explicit and shifting symbolism, I attempt to enrich and enliven depictions of squares in videogames."

10) "A blue circle moves across a blank screen, finds a sunflower, and the world turns yellow: bleep bleep. That's a game poem."

1) "Star Trek is often hailed for its prophetic dimensions, both anticipating technological 'innovation' and using allegory and optimistic visions of a utopian future to comment critically on war, racism, and capitalist inequality here and now. But Trek has almost always articulated this futurity through starships, explorers, and other images of mobility—and leaving places behind, as the late artist and critic John Berger observed, has a way of concealing consequences. DS9's stationary allegorical geography meant from the outset that it would be, as series writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe puts it, a 'show ... about consequences.' The series juxtaposes multiple clashing political, economic, and cultural perspectives embedded in a single contested place, one far from the glitz of the Enterprise or the manicured lawns of Starfleet Headquarters. It foregrounds contradictions between the Federation's comfortable core and its misunderstood and exploited Bajoran periphery, from the outside looking in. Instead of an itinerant spacecraft, this was a place where consequences would have to be, as Rodney King suggested, 'worked out.'"

2) "DS9's radical interventions also raise the question of place, and the role that local conflicts can play in global struggles against racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and empire. Attention to place is, perhaps understandably, dismissed in some corners of the political Left as sentimental, nostalgic, and reactionary. Place-based struggles, so the thinking goes, can never hope to defeat global systems of capitalist exploitation that are notoriously wily and adept at producing and taking advantage of differences across space. Challenging this view, the late geographer Doreen Massey argued that places are dynamic, capable of holding multiple identities and meanings, and defined through their specific material and cultural relationships to other places. Massey's work resonates with long-standing themes in many Indigenous cosmogonies. The late theologian Vine Deloria Jr., for instance, linked the priority of time over space in Western thought to the West's outsized role in environmental destruction, and to mass alienation in capitalist societies. These more complex views of place urge careful attention to context as a prerequisite for evaluating the politics of localized political struggles. They enable chapter 2 to affirm the progressive, emancipatory character of Bajoran anticolonial nationalisms and the Prophets' nod to theologies of liberation, and they enable A Different 'Trek' to evaluate the import of DS9's place-based intervention in Trek's hypermobile spatial epistemologies."

3) "Neither the script nor the novelization of 'Far Beyond the Stars' says much about Russell's time in the navy, where Black sailors faced a segregated division of labor, relegated to manual and service jobs, until 1944. But a brief exchange between Benny and Cassie in both texts in 1953 intimates that he began writing SF—'amateur stuff'—nearly fifteen years prior, in the late 1930s or early 1940s, while serving. At the beginning of Sisko's first extended vision as Russell, his interest in SF is met skeptically by a newspaper vendor (Aron Eisenberg/Nog), who prefers World War II films like From Here to Eternity. 'What's wrong with men from Mars?' Russell jocularly protests. He listens, both amused and uninterested, as the vendor gushes about Burt Lancaster's celluloid military heroics, and then silently hands the vendor a coin. Given Russell's experiences, is it not politically instructive that he would be more intrigued by 'men from Mars' than by reliving the wartime dramas of a white movie star? If not as openly seditious as draft resisters, we must take seriously Benny Russell's everyday, creative, 'amateurish' distractedness from harsh manual labor, his proneness to speculative fabulation, his susceptibility to dreams of 'otherwise possibilities,' including dreams of Black self-determination in the twenty-fourth century."

4) "More accustomed to the role of anticolonial freedom fighter than agent of a postcolonial state with which she often adamantly disagrees, Kira grows tremendously over DS9's seven years. She is often described as letting go of her anger, trauma, and Bajoran nationalism in a tidy liberal narrative of overcoming. Yet it is perhaps closer to the mark to say that Kira's politics and values don't change, but her heart does. Grounded in historical experience and insights from the Prophets, Kira remains in some sense a particularist—resolutely place based, religiously orthodox, fiercely anticolonial. But she becomes, in cultural studies scholar Ramzi Fawaz's felicitous phrase, 'a particularist with a heart for the universal,' making Bajoran experience a departure point for insight, empathy, and solidarity with a range of oppressed peoples. Kira models an alternative form of cosmopolitanism, one out of step with pretensions of liberal imperialist universality and replete with possibilities for international/interplanetary contact and comradeship."

5) "The decision to minimize Bajoran makeup requirements stems from producer Rick Berman's admiration for TNG actor Michelle Forbes, who portrayed Ensign Ro. Berman reportedly told Michael Westmore, the celebrated makeup supervisor on TNG and DS9, 'We've hired a pretty girl and I want to keep her that way. Think of something that we can take and make her look a little alien, and still get the idea shes from another planet, but she's still gorgeous.' Forbes, whose full name is Michelle Renee Forbes Guajardo, is of English, Welsh, and Mexican American descent and has dark-brown hair, light-brown eyes, and fair skin. The point here is not to scrutinize Forbes, a brilliant actor and a refreshingly thoughtful Leftist voice in Hollywood's sea of inchoate liberals. Rather, it is to note that the Bajorans as we know and see them are a product of Berman's valuation of fair-skinned beauty, of his directive to make that beauty visible. Casting white actors in the roles of colonized peoples is by no means a problem unique to the Bajorans, DS9, or Star Trek. The whitewashing of anticolonial allegory is a defining crisis of mainstream American SF. International studies scholar Robert A. Saunders remarks that such a habit 'inverts the genuine threat that Euro-American imperialism has posed to the non-white people of the world.' Anthropologist John G. Russell argues that such racial camouflage in SF is a cynical move that protects writers and studios from both critiques of appropriation and right-wing reaction while cashing in on the palatability of whiteness with global audiences."

6) "Some critics see in the Dominion and its galaxy-ordering mission a purely racist social formation, devoid of any profit motive or other economic imperative. Yet as Gonzalez astutely observes, the Dominion's racism and its extractive economic logics are intimately intertwined. The very first mention of the Dominion comes in 'Rules of Acquisition,' which follows Ferengi attempts to expand 'synthehol' booze sales into the Gamma Quadrant. When Quark presses a trading partner for details about this mysterious 'Dominion,' she grows circumspect, counseling, 'Let's just say if you want to do business in the Gamma Quadrant, you have to do business with the Dominion.' When Bajor later signs a nonaggression pact with the Dominion to prevent a redux of the Cardassian Occupation, the Dominion isolates the planet from all external trade. And the Dominion war machine relies heavily on intensive resource extraction, notably for mineral ingredients for Ketracel-White, which directly informs its territorial interests. Even the Founders' gelatinous default state—their shape-shifting abilities—allegorizes not only the phantasmatic mobility of whiteness but that of capital as well."

7) "But if Odo is queer, he remains a queer of a particular, privileged sort. He is indeed alienated, cast out from home, the only one of his kind on the station—and yet the community from which he hails is one of extreme wealth and power, one whose persecutory anxieties authorize an ideology of race and class supremacy. What could it mean, then, for privileged queers like Odo to fail, or refuse, to reproduce the cultural and political logics of his 'own people'—especially if those logics are oppressive and cruel?"

8) "'Bar Association,' then, is a wonderful exception to Hassler-Forest's observation that Star Trek rarely fleshes out the democratizing implications of its postcapitalist premise. Ironically, refusing to follow Trek rules and simply banish money enabled DS9 to critique capitalism, in the twenty-fourth century and in the twentieth. Shimerman has praised the episode for addressing class contradictions that mainstream television often elides: 'People think of this as a comic episode. And it is, of course. But in truth, it's really about union-management problems. The irony of it is that I play management in the episode. So I thought that to make Rom have a reasonably hard job as a union organizer, I would have to be tough about it, to show the struggle to the audience. Although you don't see it on TV very often, this is something that goes on in America all the time.' Rather than some distant future in which technology smoothly outsources so-called 'repetitive, energy-intensive, low-skill, high-output labor' to machines, 'Bar Association' critically reflects the rise of a service economy in the United States, returning us to the contradictions of our own world and the struggles to transform it."

9) "What is rightly hated in Trump, like what is hated in the Ferengi, in truth implicates a system that is bipartisan, to say the least. The very founding of the United States—a plantation economy fueled by kidnapped and coerced African labor and built on stolen Indigenous lands and the genocide of Indigenous peoples—would seem to embody the 52nd Rule of Acquisition, itself a political theology of accumulation by dispossession: 'Never ask when you can take.' Likewise, the rise of a permanent military-industrial complex in the United States after World War II—a thoroughly bipartisan affair that has also militarized U.S. police departments—exemplifies the 35th Rule: 'War is good for business.' Faced with contemporary economic and public health crises, both major parties rush to take care of corporate donors and neglect the multiracial poor and working classes, heeding the 162nd Rule: 'Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit.' These contradictions cannot be pinned on Trump, nor even on the Republican Party, alone. To suggest as much is to fetishize both Trump and the Ferengi, rather than heed the occasion for thoroughgoing critical reflection and more transformative political commitment that both offer."

10) "If there is a heroic, suffering O'Brien, then, perhaps it is the indispensable Professor Keiko Ishikawa O'Brien, first and foremost. As an engineer, Miles might keep the lights on at DS9, but it is Keiko who, consigned to the position of trailing spouse, champions efforts to collectivize social reproduction on the station, founding and defending the station school and welcoming Kira into her extended family as a brave experiment in collective kinship. Keiko produces scholarship on local botany in collaboration with Bajoran colleagues who are rebuilding agricultural and scientific infrastructure in the wake of the devastating Cardassian Occupation. She does all of this while raising her own children, pushing her husband to be a better person, and abiding the stress of routine threats to her husband's safety as a condition of his work. We only get glimpses of station life from Keiko O'Brien's perspective occasionally. But taking Keiko's geographies seriously challenges fantasies of a future that has automated away the 'low-skilled' work of social reproduction or 'innovated' away the political problems that surround racialized and gendered divisions of labor. Keiko's frustrations also offer a cautionary tale, suggesting that if the privatized, neoliberal family values of the 1990s remain the best that twenty-fourth-century humanity has to offer, the same crises of social reproduction and the same racialized and gendered divisions of labor will continue to fester, even in a 'postscarcity' Federation economy. In the decades since DS9 aired, this warning has certainly proven prescient. Rather than dismissing Professor O'Brien as 'annoying,' we might yet learn from her example, finding fairer ways to organize and distribute the joys and burdens of care work and fighting for that work to be valued and supported."

11) "Finally, as we saw in chapter 1, Garak is central to the events of 'In the Pale Moonlight,' carrying out the outsourced, illegal, and immoral dirty work of espionage, including murder, that Sisko cannot undertake himself. Garak is at once an enabling queer outsider to the Cardassian imperial family who eagerly serves its shady security state and an illiberal, enabling outsider to the Federation's liberal multicultural empire who abets it by carrying out the same sorts of unspeakable deeds. We might even read Garak's work for Sisko as a metaphor for the contemporary alliances between military multiculturalisms and neoconservative imperialisms, alliances increasingly embodied in the U.S. Democratic Party."