🌸Bloom
Introduction American schooling is often described in binary terms: either a benevolent public good that lifts children out of ignorance and poverty, or an assembly line that manufactures compliant workers for an unequal economy. Neither framing survives close scrutiny. Institutionalized education is better understood as a single structural mechanism — hierarchy, authority, ritual, and conferred […]
🌱 Planted Jul 5, 2026
🌸Bloom
Trauma theory began, as so much of modern literary criticism does, with Freud. In Studies on Hysteria, he and Joseph Breuer proposed that an extreme event isn’t traumatic in the moment so much as it becomes traumatic later, surfacing during a latency period when some unrelated trigger calls the repressed memory back up. Decades later, […]
🌱 Planted Jun 19, 2026
🌸Bloom
I’ve been thinking a lot about the cruelty of bureaucracy–it keeps showing up in the books I’m reading, and what is required to combat it. On a basic level, recognizing how these systems operate is crucial: they thrive on isolation, compliance, and the exhaustion of the individual. When a system treats people as data points, […]
🌱 Planted Jan 15, 2026