by Rachel O’Dwyer and Linda Doyle Introduction In The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online, editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly (2009) argues that the collaborative cultures emerging around web 2.0 platforms cultivate a “digital socialism”, with broad political and economic implications for the producers of online culture. Kelly, alongside others, sees the…
Read MoreJosiah Ober Josiah Ober is a classicist and political theorist at Stanford University, and his work on ancient Greek democracy is widely read in both disciplines. The Art of Theory recently spoke with him about Athens, democracy, and fly-fishing. The Art of Theory What prompted your interest in classics? Josiah Ober I attended a troubled,…
Read MoreCover of Grammar-Land: Grammar in Fun for the Children of Schoolroom-shire, by M. L. Nesbitt, 1878 by Deborah Cameron The national curriculum for England and Wales, introduced at the end of the 1980s, made it mandatory for schools to teach English grammar. Yet the myth still persists that grammar has not been taught since the…
Read MoreEven people with no interest in field guides know about them…
Read Moreby Jesse Miksic I. Trainsylvania It’s cold and wet – the worst kind of early winter morning. I’m traversing a landscape under endless gray cloud cover, the ground softened to the consistency of flesh by a long night of rain. I pass through areas that look like small cities, sprawls of gray buildings groped by…
Read MoreEarly vaudeville photo from the collection of Bob Bragman, as featured in the San Francisco Chronicle by Peggy Nelson Short attention span theater is hardly the new kid on the block. In the vaudeville era, an act was viable if it could manage to keep the audience’s attention for three minutes. Three minutes! That’s a…
Read MoreTarahumara runners From The New Yorker: The search for the one best way of running is what drives Chris McDougall’s “Born to Run,” which came out in 2009 and has sold at least half a million copies since. The book tells the story of a group of larger-than-life ultramarathoners, with names like Caballo Blanco and…
Read MoreFrom Trainspotting, Miramax, 1996 by Julian Hanich In this essay [1] I try to categorize the range of artistic options that filmmakers currently have at hand to evoke bodily disgust. [2] Or, to reframe this approach in a slightly different manner: If we examine the variety of disgusting scenes at the movies, how can we…
Read Moreby Dan Arnold In the fraught and often vacuous discourse on religion vis-à-vis science, cognitive-scientific research has recently come to have especially high profile significance. In academic religious studies, such research has perhaps most often been enlisted to support reductionist accounts of human religiousness, with books like Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained typically purporting to show…
Read MoreIllustration by DonkeyHotey by A. Staley Groves I admit a smile crossed my face when I read Breitbart was rushed to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and pronounced dead. Not because his children would lose a father, nor his wife a husband. Rather that the iconoclastic boy-warrior was welcomed into eternity in no other…
Read MoreThe Five Pound Note Office, Bank of England, 1841 by Jacob Funk Kirkegaard and Carmen M Reinhart In light of the record or near-record levels of public and private debt, debt-reduction strategies are likely to remain at the forefront of policy discussions in most of the advanced economies for the foreseeable future (Reinhart and Sbrancia…
Read MoreDetail from poster for Beat the Devil, Romulus Films, 1953 From Chapter One: Africa and Technology “Africa” has also been a fetish in Western imaginations, and for far longer than the atom bomb. Savage and starving, inferior and infantile, superstitious and corrupt—the list of pejoratives goes on and on. The image of Africans as irrational…
Read Moreby Shuwei Fang Dan Breznitz is an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and The College of Management, and is an Associate Professor by courtesy at the School of Public Policy. Prof. Breznitz’s most recent book (co-authored with Michael Murphree) is The Run of the Red Queen: Government,…
Read MoreJean Dujardin as George Valentin and John Goodman as Al Zimmer in The Artist, Warner Bros., 2011 by Meaghan Emery Every once in a while a film comes out that breaks through conventional wisdom. The idea that a black and white silent film in 2011 could be such a resounding critical and commercial success, in…
Read MoreFrom Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2003 by Jennifer Rhee How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion, by Daniel H. Wilson, Bloomsbury, 176 pp. Robopocalypse: A Novel, by Daniel H. Wilson, Doubleday, 370 pp. The pace of robotics technology is quickening; robots are leaving…
Read Moreby Eli S. Evans There is a moment in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 Masculin Feminin in which the character played by a young and brilliant Jean-Pierre Léaud claims that one day at home while eating mashed potatoes his father discovered why the earth goes round the sun. “Galileo discovered it first,” he a moment later concedes,…
Read MoreThe Surrender of Zeelandia, from Verwaerloosde Formosa, 1675 by Tonio Andrade This February marked the 350th anniversary of an important but forgotten war: the Sino-Dutch War of 1661-1662. The Dutch, who’d defeated the British, the Portuguese and the Spanish, whose guns and military practices were famous throughout Europe, found themselves outfought, out-led and outmaneuvered by…
Read MoreV. Covers. From L-R: first Italian edition (1965), first German edition (1968), first English paperback edition (1966), first Modern Library edition (1966) by Martin Paul Eve The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 212pp. The Cambridge Companion series has become, in academic literary…
Read MoreGoogle office, Zurich by Abe Walker Abstract This article takes as its central object of study Google’s innovative time off program, colloquially known as ‘20 Percent Time’. This program represents a radical departure from conventional approaches to organizing the workday, and is quickly gaining traction in the technology sector and beyond. Under the directive of…
Read MoreBank of Chosen, Seoul by Michael Schiltz We are living through ominous times. In the wake of the 2008 subprime crisis, the world economy has been battered by a series of profound shocks that have not been experienced since the 1930s. A series of shocks, indeed, because, as was the case in the Great Depression,…
Read More
