Any Charles Bowden readers out there? If you get a chance read 'At the Peripheries of Violence and Desire'. Warning, Bowden is not for the faint of heart, you may find yourself changed. It appeared in Harper's Magazine 8/1998, one of the best magazines ever published. It is also in 'The Charles Bowden Reader'. Sexual violence - rape - is its topic and its complication. Read it, link below.
If you are a libertarian or other free market fantastic check out his wring on Mexico and the workers. Their pay, their hours, their deaths, again stay away if you want to remain a naive free marketer.
I loved his pieces on his pet rattlesnake Beulah or all the bats.
http://harpers.org/archive/1998/08/torch-song-2/
https://aeon.co/essays/in-memory-of-...d-a-sensualist
"He had the most interesting and original mind that I ever got to know well. It cut right through the conventional wisdom and surface veneer to the stark uncomfortable truth. His intellectual honesty compelled him to fully acknowledge the horrors and pointlessness of the human experiment in this world, but he never lost his sense of wonder or curiosity. Even as he catalogued the monstrous dystopias emerging from social and political collapse in Mexico, even as he prophesied the bleakest of futures for our ransacked planet, his love of life was undiminished – mainly because he could take such pleasure from the colour of a bird’s throat, the feel of a woman’s thigh under his fingertips, the rain falling like arrows on the desert as the sky convulsed in thunder." from essay above
Books
https://www.amazon.com/Charles-Bowde...=books&ie=UTF8
https://www.amazon.com/Murder-City-C...=books&ie=UTF8
"Legalized drugs would cause dislocations in the US economy - the prison industry for example and tens of billions spent annually on drug enforcement. But because the US economy is so large, this would be a minor blow, hardly as severe as the ultimate nightmare for the US economy, global peace, which would shutter its death industry commonly called the military/industrial complex." Charles Bowden