Berfrois

June 2011

Flat-Packs and Prose

Flat-Packs and Prose

Graffiti art by Banksy, near Ikea Croydon From Boston Review: Every Sunday morning I spend a few hours with the colossal edition of the New York Times and its tendency to sum up because I don’t want to see the week coming; I’d rather watch it going. One Sunday...

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Michael Sandel Talks Justice

Michael Sandel Talks Justice

   Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, and is one of the most influential political theorists of our time. Jonathan Bruno and Jason Swadley sat down with him recently in Cambridge with 12 questions on the craft of...

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‘Charmed sentences follow one another like dance steps along the winding road itself’

‘Charmed sentences follow one another like dance steps along the winding road itself’

Yellow Brick Philosophy | by Ellen Handler Spitz

The Book

Although details have not yet been released, The Los Angeles Times reported last year that preliminary plans are in the works for an upcoming movie of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard...

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Thomas Pynchon, (Relative) Feminist by Joanna Freer

Thomas Pynchon, (Relative) Feminist by Joanna Freer

From the cover of The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon, 1964 by Joanna Freer Over the years Thomas Pynchon has gained a reputation as a writer with strong humanist principles. His representations of the suffering of the South-West African Herero under the genocidal German imperial regime are particularly notable...

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‘Liberal secularism is on its way to becoming the new group-think’

‘Liberal secularism is on its way to becoming the new group-think’

by Markha Valenta The ritual slaughter of animals has become the last of many areas of contention that are changing the shape of our public domains. The way in which Islamophobia is becoming a part of our public ‘common sense’ has complex knock-on effects, not least for our Jewish...

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S. Jonathan Wiesen: Decaffeinated Nazis

S. Jonathan Wiesen: Decaffeinated Nazis

by S. Jonathan Wiesen In the United States, there are numerous consumer products with controversial pasts. We need only think of our grocery aisles and kitchen cabinets, where racist images of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben have only recently given way to updated, less stereotypical depictions of African Americans....

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Ship Out

Ship Out

Allen Ginsberg dressed up for working at his Market Research job, Berkely, 1954, Allen Ginsberg Project by Joe Linker When did literature become an elitist game? When we started writing? Literature both reflects and influences culture, society, and the individual, but there are many things that reflect our values (what...

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When Drones Strike

When Drones Strike

From Columbia Journalism Review: In the spring of 2009, New York Times reporter David Rohde was being held captive by Taliban gunmen in a house in Waziristan, a mountainous region on the Pakistan side of the border with Afghanistan. Aerial drones soared overhead, filling him and his kidnappers with...

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‘The New York hustler was both homosexual object-choice and heterosexual subject par excellence’

‘The New York hustler was both homosexual object-choice and heterosexual subject par excellence’

Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as Joe Buck and Enrico Rizzo, Midnight Cowboy, United Artists, 1969  by Jason Narlock New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America, by Barry Reay, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 279 pp. One of the most enduring legacies of the lesbian and gay rights movement...

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