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The more urgent problem here in the UK, as in the United States, is that the quasi-comprehensive model is being taken over by the private sector, with the potential for profit-making looming clearly. In the US, corporate educational reform is sucking the lifeblood out of an already badly pummelled public education system and I fear that the same thing is going to happen here.
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The Situationist International is the gift that keeps on giving, in the ambiguous sense that gifts are a good thing but also a problem: We don’t always know how to make them go away.
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I'm not sure I would use the word "radical." I would say that in the 1950s, Playboy was subversive in various ways: It celebrated free sexuality amongst single, "nice" girls, which was contrary to so much of postwar popular culture.
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For better or worse, Derrida continues to be a dominant figure in the academic humanities. There's a steady stream of books about and by him (during his life Derrida published about seventy books; there have been at least a half-dozen more since he died, six years ago). Most of the books about Derrida take him as gospel truth, claiming that he uncovered, for the first time, an essential truth about life and the world. Derrida wrote brilliantly about so many central thinkers of the Western tradition: Plato, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger and many more. In Who Was Jacques Derrida? I offer vignettes of these philosophers, giving my own sense of their work, along with an account of what Derrida did with them. Often, Derrida gave a partial or misleading account of his philosophical influences, but he always did so in an interesting way. The struggle between him and his great predecessors is dazzling to watch. I try to present these encounters in a lively and readable way, for readers who may not have the time or stamina to wend their way through Derrida's many books, which can be tough going at times.
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Newsgames are a way of doing journalism with games, so they exist somewhere in-between the two concepts as we usually think of them. This isn’t to say that they fit there neatly. Newsgames call attention to current and past issues that might not have received the scrutiny they deserve, they analyse these issues in ways that the written word or video can’t, they exist on a spectrum between professional and citizen reportage, they can be “hard” or “soft,” relevant or ridiculous. Some newsgames are meant to inform, some to persuade, and some to simply poke fun.
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We find, for instance, homoerotic and incestuous subjects at the center of closet dramas by Byron and Shelley, just as we find them at the center of closet dramas by Pound and Stein. But I argue that there is a historical specificity to the modernist revival of the closet drama as a site for queer meaning-making. The modernists’ moment is one in which the new sexual sciences have codified a range of identities and ways of understanding identity-formation, making the task of resisting regimes of sexuality more urgent than it would have been, say, in the early or mid-nineteenth century.
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by Charles LaPorte
If the Bible was best viewed as poetry, many felt, modern poetry could also come to serve a cultural role like that traditionally held by scripture. In this context, it should surprise us little to see Robert Browning addressed by his admirers as God’s very mouthpiece, or Alfred Tennyson spoken of as a veritable prophet.
by Rex Veeder
As a student of rhetoric, I was introduced to Marshall McLuhan in one or two classes during the 60s and 70s but the introduction was brief – more like having a family member introduce you to an uncle from Canada who, although he was family, somehow didn’t fit in. He was inappropriate. 
by Nico Slate
Connections between Indian and African American freedom struggles go well beyond the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The Montgomery Story comic book was published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group that by the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott had been working for decades to translate Gandhian methods for use in the struggle for racial equality in the United States.
by Leslie Paul Thiele
We are in the midst of an extinction crisis that rivals any in the last 65 million years. And we are altering the planet’s climate. But as we begin to accept the burden of responsibility for our actions, we are also reinforcing a false image of our species. 
by Philip Kitcher
It may seem that treating ethics as a human phenomenon, as a work-in-progress, undermines its authority. Without absolute commands, is everything permitted? Why, if the ethical maxims that currently govern our lives have emerged in this way, should we obey them? To say that ethics is founded in the command of God – or the dictates of Reason, for that matter – doesn’t help. 
by Tamar Aylat-Yaguri
It would be a contradiction to claim that both man and God could be simultaneously right and just. Either God is in the wrong (and there is no theodicy) or man is in the wrong, always in the wrong, and there is theodicy. 
by Keith and Orrin Pilkey
If the vast majority of scientists believe that humans are directly contributing to climate change, then why do polls show that fewer Americans today see global warming as a serious threat than they did two years ago? This public opinion phenomenon is directly attributable to groups motivated to misinform the public. 
by Nicholas Rombes
The vague commune in Martha Marcy May Marlene exists as a sort of unfulfilled dream. As with the other Occupy Zeitgeist films, the deceptively shambling narrative structure hints at a fantasy of disorder, the disorder of the natural world in the heart of a city, a desire not to dismantle the dominant social structures, but to circumvent it altogether. 
by John Beverley
There are many, and often deep, differences among the new governments of the left in Latin America, but in my opinion they do not resolve themselves into a neat dichotomy, which has the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is an important emerging contradiction in the Pink Tide, but it is one within the governments of the Tide rather than between them. 
by Junko Kitanaka
Suicide has long been a site of conceptual struggle for psychiatrists, who have encountered resistance from lay Japanese holding on to the cultural notion of suicide as a morally positive act of self-determination, carried out at times as a protest against social injustice. 
by Jonathan Lear
On the face of it, a conception does not seem the sort of thing it is easy to lose. If we think of our life with concepts in terms of our ways of going on, categorizing and thinking about the phenomena in the world, including ourselves, then it makes sense that certain concepts might lose their viability for us, and thus fall out of use.
by James Joyce
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. Most Popular
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