I promised to spend my snow day in bed, reading with Holden Caufield and drinking Peppermint tea, but after 30 minutes, I’m restless, anxious. I find my gloves.

I like the way the snow covers up mistakes. Bundles up insecurities. The snow blankets the sidewalk and fills in the cracks. Everything is made equal. The city the virgin. In her pristine presence, everyone covers themselves to the point of suffocation. Children sweating and overheating like small vocal radiatiors. Begging their mothers to let them take of their hoods, their scarves, their sweaters. Mothers pull strings tighter, tuck corners deeper. It’s too warm for this weather. The rain and the snow fall together like cousins. Dancing some incestuous dance, they slop on my cheeks, her hands, his hat. There are men pushing the slush around, away from their doorsteps, with red shovels and plastic bags tied over their knotted hands.

I’m feeling mighty and defiant. I could fill my emptiness with soggy wanderlust, fill in my vacanices with snowy vagaries. My boots are the champions of the day, staunch and brown and determined. Let us march they say. Let us.

Block after block, the scenery stays the same. Fifth Avenue is as ugly as the rest in this sort of storm. Some of the people are outside, but nobody is rushing. All of us are taking advantage of the opportunity to be late, and wet, and sour. To blame it on the weather. Communal worship. We don’t even make eye contact. Such modesty.

It’s treacherous, this holy wonderland. There are vast oceanic puddles the slate gray of the concrete, disguising themselves to the weary traveler. Under the newest down there is old black ice that’s been around for hours and learned the tricks of the trade. City streets are not for dancing. After hours of trudging, my face stings like fire and my hands stiffen like ice. My boots are darker, wetter, stronger. A certain gust of wind blows me into a blue and white cafe, where I immediately pull off my hat and gloves, and take a seat, wondering if I might pull off my boots in public. I am approached by a waitress who looks warm and pale and lovely. I ask for coffee and an egg. She brings me both, and a bagel, and some fried potates. “House Special” she says, and I wonder how I so often elicit others pity, even my own. Here I am again, feeling sorry for myself. I deserve to be out in the rain with such soggy setimentality still filling my thoughts.

If it has stopped snowing, I can’t tell for the wind. It’s too hard to open my eyes, and through my squinting I can see the street lamps have come on to illuminate the shapeless, shifting gray. There is a woman in a puddle outside the Louis Vuitton glass front. Just laying there, eyes wide open in a goddamn puddle like a frozen duck. She has a dark gray blanket and no hat. I notice she has no hat because someone else noticed it first, and he was busy pulling his own hat off his head and jamming it down over the ears of this sad lonely duck in the pond.

Someone sometime on the radio had said if you call 311 in New York city, they’ll come pick up people with nowhere else to be. I couldn’t help but think about the ducks, and the fish, frozen there, protected by “God” till spring. All the while, I’m just standing and she’s just looking. The man I love decides to call me just then, just for that moment, and any sort of self-pitying I may or may not have been engaged in seemed foreign and unnatural. I can’t even tell him about it, and he’s the one I tell. I call the number, and after 30 minutes of robotic redirection and tacky hold music, there is a bright, kind voice on the other end. Says they’ll be right there, they have a lot of beds in the womens shelter. Never thought maybe I was jumping to conclusions, until I hung up the phone. Maybe she didn’t want to be picked up? But she was just lying there. Other people were starting to get the same idea, stopping to ask her if she needed a ride. I got to thinking she was awfully brave, making all these uncomfortable people so uncomfortable.

The whole time she never takes her eyes off me. I don’t know what to say to her, I couldn’t think of anything at all. It all sounded stupid in my head, so I just try to smile some gray, winter smile, and then I walk off. I think she may have smiled too, or maybe her teeth were chattering. I’m no hero. I don’t know.

I was gonna go home, but I was all soggy in the brain, so I went down into a subway station to finish the book. Not even a train passed by. “I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful.”

Home is always somewhere else. Home is both “here” and “there” or somewhere in between. Sometimes its nowhere.

To the nomad within me, I find it comforting and inspiring to start of a new decade exploring the ‘heres,’ ‘theres,’ and nowheres of this wanderlust world. Crossing and between spaces provide opportunities that are rich with oppositionally and complementary charged revelations that enable us to speak and move about globalized, mediaized, and, as Gómez-Peña would say, Balkanized world. Navigating the layers of identities that have become the postmodern-modern experience takes twirling and redesigning our discussions and existences in a way that is consistent with the experiences we have as part of migratory societies. We need to become more versed in the ways of these tricksters and coyotes like Gómez-Peña who can help us to navigate increasingly complex and protean identities. Artists, politicians, writers, activists, and world citizens who turn maps sideways and backways, turning expectations into memories, and pasts into waking dreams.

An ability to understand the hybrid nature of culture develops from an experience of dealing with a dominant culture from the outside. The artist who understands and practices hybridity in this way can be at the same time an insider and an outsider, an expert in border crossings, a temporary member of multiple communities, a citizen of two or more nations. S/he performs multiple communities, a citizen of two or more nations. S/he performs multiple roles in multiple contexts. At times s/he operates as a cross-cultural diplomat, as an intellectual coyote (smuggler of ideas) or a media pirate. At other times, s/he assumes the role of nomadic chronicler, intercultural translator, or political trickster. S/he speaks from more than one perspective, to more than one community, about more than one reality. His/her job is to trespass, bridge, interconnect, reinterpret, remap, and redefine; to find the outer limits of his/her culture and cross them.

In a way, Gómez-Peña is asking us to look at ourselves as characters able of performing outside of the limits we have set for ourselves as part of, what at the everyday level, seems to be rooted and bounded identities. As performers, we can change costumes, masks, and languages, imagining identities and performing them in real time. We are characters within greater social, national, ethnic, sexual, gendered, raced, and generational performances. Embracing the openness and flexibility of this role can provide a way towards confronting boundaries and limitations that demarcate differences, inequalities, and conflicts–perhaps giving us a way to discuss and solve some of our society’s most entrenched social problems. When we are characters we extend beyond our limits; touching possibilities we cannot if we remain bounded to fixed and static categories that resist flow and change.

Resolution: find the borders and move between and through them. Always. Keep. Dancing. Read this book. Now.

The result of over a decade-long field study, Righteous Dopefiend follows the lives of several heroin addicts living under Edgewater Boulevard, a freeway overpass in the picturesque city by the bay. The authors’ approach to the project is one that self-consciously “suspends moral judgment.” The challenge to both the writers and the audience is to set aside opinions on urban vice associated with homelessness and addiction, enabling the narrative to emerge from the people who live these lives.

The self-conscious decision to make a critical yet sensitive study is conveyed through the distinct style of the book. The risk of confirming negative stereotypes through “jarring photography” is of the upmost concern to the authors. Bourgois and Schonberg thus create a dialogue between rich black-and-white photographs, vivid excerpts from their field notes, and critical social theory. Excerpts from the fieldnotes give context for images which the audience may not readily comprehend.

By accompanying the photographs with fieldnotes and scholarly analysis, the impression of addiction becomes multi-faceted, ensuring that the addict experience is not pigeonholed. They remark, “as anthropologists studying people who live under conditions of extreme duress and distress, we feel it is imperative to link theory to practice. Otherwise, we would be merely intellectual voyeurs.” Bourgois and Schonberg’s balance between image, word, and theory reflects their research methods, inviting the audience to witness and experience, rather than analyze , this community.

The community created through drug use is the centerpiece of their study. The authors depict aspects of street life through the voices and meditations of various people living under Edgewater Boulevard. The personal relationships between addicts create a distinct community with its own particular moral and ethical rules. Dopesickness, for example, an ailment encompassing the severe physical symptoms of heroin withdrawal, is an experience that fuels the “moral economy of sharing.” Being sick elicits empathy among members who are both friends and enemies. “It is considered unethical,” the authors observe, “to leave a person stranded when he or she is dopesick unless one is openly feuding with that person.”

Assuaging dopesickness is one of the few instances where ethnic and racial boundaries may be crossed. Although the power of addiction may appear to overwhelm racism, division along racial and ethnic lines is part of everyday life on Edgewater Boulevard. When Bourgois asks Hank, one of the white dopefiends, why the scene is predominately white, Hank replies, “You’ll see very few black people homeless…because they’re knocking out kids on welfare.” Several members harbor mistrust and stereotypes of dopefiends from differing ethnic backgrounds despite being intertwined in a network of dealing and dependency.

Besides delving into the shadows of street life, the authors also explore the evolution of love between residents of the camp. One couple, Tina and Carter, develop a surprisingly domestic and committed relationship despite personal histories of abuse, homelessness, and addiction. Bourgois and Schonberg also follow Hank and Petey, best friends and lovers who struggle to live in a homophobic, yet fraternal, environment. Their turbulent relationship is tempered by the impediments that surround them: possible eviction, pan-handling, hospitalization, methadone treatment, and death.

Bourgois and Schonberg preserve the dopefiends’ humanity while simultaneously excavating the grittiest aspects of life on the street, managing to keep their commitment to put aside moral judgment. Reminiscent of an evocative documentary film, their book is beautifully shot, intelligent, and engaging.

Photography by Jeff Schonberg

Instead of focusing on the differences between pirates and the people they attack, Leeson draws out the similarities between democratic societies and the world of piracy. He begins by extending Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” theory to the economies of pirates. Leeson makes a simple yet critical connection, “Smith’s invisible hand is as true for criminals as it is for anyone else, although criminals direct their cooperation at someone else’s loss.” Our land-based economy cannot survive with individuals working entirely alone for personal benefit, and neither can a pirate economy. Leeson points out that pirates must work together to benefit from, as he aptly names it, the invisible hook.

The invisible hook, Leeson writes, led pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries to create democratic and ethical codes that had uncanny resemblances to the constitutional democracies crafted during the same era. While captains acted like kings on merchant ships, pirates crafted their societies around maximizing profit for everyone, and cooperation was the only way to secure it. Democratic codes created solidarity among them, giving each man equal representation and power for deciding everything from who was captain to how to divide up booty. Some codes even articulated how to pay out insurance to pirates injured on the job, and how to vote out a dishonorable captain. It was a far cry from the merchant ships, whose captains acted like kings.

Even the best-known stereotypes of pirates fit into Leeson’s economic theories, as examples of pirates’ “signaling” and “branding” to secure booty with minimal cost. The greatest of these signals was the Jolly Roger, the famed skull and cross-bones flag. “The Jolly Roger, then, signaled ‘pirate,’” Leeson writes, “which meant two things. ‘If you resist us, we’ll slaughter you. If you submit to us peacefully, we’ll let you live.’” The flag, along with the barbaric reputation it carried, enabled pirates to exercise power over mercantile ships with little effort, albeit with sometimes incredibly cruel punishment. Most of the time, however, crews submitted peacefully, relieving pirates of the trouble of fighting.

Whenever pirates did have to live up to their reputations, as Leeson explains, they had stipulations to follow. Torture was one of the acts significantly regulated by pirate code, primarily used for three main reasons, according to Leeson: to gain information, especially about treasure on captured ships; to punish government officials in retaliation for capturing or executing other pirates; and to punish abusive merchant captains. Pirates were merciless to those who did not surrender or cooperate, but were surprisingly humane to those who knew better than to challenge the Jolly Roger.

Going further into the dynamic culture and society of piracy, Leeson discloses some surprising facts about pirate conscription. Forcing merchant sailors to either “join the pirate crew or die,” Leeson tells us, was the exception and not the rule to pirate recruitment. More often then not, the economic benefits of joining a pirate ship outweighed the costs of remaining a lowly merchant crew member. Furthermore, Leeson sheds light on pirates’ progressive and profitable approach to racial tolerance, capitalizing on the economic benefits of having black men on their ships and sometimes even granting them equal rights.

The Invisible Hook reconciles the world of pirates and men by applying what we understand about democratic society, justice, and, ultimately, economics, to piracy. Leeson does the work of economist at a level that does not require fluency in economic theory. He writes with awe and respect for piracy, reconciling a childhood fascination with a mature and informed understanding of these rebellious seamen.