March 2015
In the Politics

In the Politics, Aristotle famously defines man as zoon politikon, the political animal. But what does it mean to say of man that he is the political animal?
Read MoreThree Ways of Arguing With a Communist

They do not seem to see that, to such young people, the Capitalist in question only seems to be saying, "I am a greedy old scoundrel, and I forbid you to be anything else."
Read MoreNeither Cheerleader Nor Prophet

Literature on the social impact of the internet has always struggled to keep up with the breakneck pace set by its subject.
Read MoreDada’s Sex

We are getting close to the 100 year anniversary of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and I dedicate my post to Tzara while reading the recent biography about him.
Read MoreHas American poetry become more politically relevant lately?

The claim for a “new” American poetry of engagement would seem to imply an earlier American poetry that lacked such engagement.
Read MoreStreet Fighter: Berfrois Interviews Tariq Ali

The extreme centre is a form of government that arose out of neoliberal economics and exists today in virtually the whole of Europe, North America and Australia.
Read MorePerforming Gender

Carlos Motta has spent the past few years creating an archive of documentary video portraits of activists and people who perform gender as a personal, social and political opportunity rather than as a social denunciation.
Read More“It’s difficult to remove intransigence from political thought”

You use the expression "antinomies of fanaticism", which we might rephrase as the paradoxes or inherent contradictions of fanaticism: on the one hand, fanaticism as the opposite of reason and, on the other, fanaticism as an excess of reason.
Read MoreVolker M. Welter on Michael Graves

The designer Michael Graves, who passed away at the age of 80 on March 12th, was widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of postmodernism in architecture.
Read MoreBreaking TV

Yet some said that “Breaking Bad” was television finally or finely elevated to art. The art of the installment, the fix, waiting for the next episode, the episodic adventure induced by Walter who like Fagin in Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” lives and thrives in a world of children.
Read MoreAround 1815

She is either Italian, Jewish, Arab, Turkish, Kurdish or Greek. She has olive skin and is wearing high heels with gold tips, a white jacket, oyster coloured skirt and carrying two iPhones, one in a black case and one red.
Read MoreSociety for the Confused

Drawn by caricaturist John Leech, the illustrations of Gilbert Abbott à Beckett’s The Comic History of Rome are a Victorian fever dream of ancient Rome.
Read MoreAmanda Gray: Beyond Good Coffee

In countries like Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia, the coworking spaces aren’t simply jumping on a trend, but are rather looking at public space and sharing economies as a tool to administer community and social change.
Read MoreDon’t Mention the Dawn

I had never seen a neo-Nazi before. On a cloudless Sunday morning in January, the day of the Greek elections, I was making my way through people holding cups of coffee and pushing strollers in a polling station.
Read MorePittsburgh Publisher-Poet

Vladimir Nabokov was hiking down a mountain on a summer afternoon. It was 1943, and he and his companion, James Laughlin, had made their way up a peak in northern Utah to find butterflies for Nabokov’s collection.
Read MorePhilosophy as It Is

Williams had a famously adversarial relationship toward some leading philosophical movements of the modern era, particularly Utilitarianism and Kantianism.
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
Read MoreNow it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
Read MoreThe persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreProust would advise us to refuse the tyranny of algorithms...
Read MoreOur work began with a question: Why do we sacrifice the pleasures of human connection in order to claim our place as “one of the boys” or as a “good” woman?
Read MoreIt is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and did not believe in miraculous powers.
Read MoreIt’s as if the natural cold of the night / is dispersed by the fog that fills the park / as you, a friend, and I walk and sit and talk...
Read MoreThe dodo was not always fat. Nobody alive is able to say for sure what a dodo was really like: the last one had died by the end of the 17th Century...
Read MoreWhat's the use of teaching Young ones how to shape love With their mouths? Let the elders Touch their own lips, let them feel How dry they are.
Read More