March 2015
Three 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 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 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 MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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