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The Unexpected
Despite calendars and clocks and all the mental gymnastics we use to control life and time, surprises are at the heart of existence. This may seem like a truism, but if so, it is one of those truths we often avoid in our desire for stability and the quelling of anxiety. Our expectations, a form […]
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Conventional Detergent: Political Science as an Ideological Laundromat
An old friend with years in the purchasing department of a leading consumer products conglomerate once told me that the active ingredient in washing powder is actually a minuscule component in those huge boxes of famous brand soap powders from which US daytime television dramas derived their sobriquet. The rest, he said mockingly, is just […]
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Solitary Confinement
At least as one response to the perceived failures of the French Revolution, some of what became the Romantic movements in the 19th century turned away from social interaction, especially collective activity, and toward individual isolation. Such a reaction was not peculiar to this period. In fact, withdrawal from social contact was an established niche […]
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Commodifying the Life of the Mind
As a long-time leader in higher ed unionism, I was recently asked to comment on the transformative changes taking place in American higher education. To answer, I reflected on my nearly sixty years in higher education. I was a working-class kid from New York City who went to CCNY, where tuition was free. Yes, free. […]
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Art Versus Capital
Many an artist have understandably taken stabs, with varying degrees of skill and success, at indicting capitalism and all its execrable effects. Rebecca Harding Davis’ short story, or novella, if you like, Life in the Iron Mills (1861), is one of the first, certainly one of the best and, given its mastery, one of the […]
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Vacation Autopsy
There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair. — David Foster Wallace, A […]
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The Ignorant Imperative: Hannah Gadsby on Pablo Picasso
The humourless comedian Hannah Gadsby has much to thank one of the twentieth century’s titans of art. By placing him in the stockade of feminist disapproval, the Australian was picking the easiest target and avoiding the most profound questions of his oeuvre. To be so personal, and play the man with such indignation, is the […]
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There Is No Escape From Telling
By the lake’s lapping shore above the town and the railroad tracks, my wife and I stopped and marveled, struck stone silent by two dazzling Baltimore Orioles, clawed together as they tumbled, wrestling in the green morning breeze above our heads. They perched upon a branch and sang a morning hymn, an ode to joy […]
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Why Isn’t the Democratic World a World?
Alain Badiou is undoubtedly among the greatest of living philosophers; one that may fairly be credited with rescuing philosophy from academic irrelevance, and the twin enemies of scientism and historicism. For Badiou, philosophy does not merely interpret the world (as Marx famously asserted in his “Theses on Feuerbach”). For an interpretation of the world, we […]
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Three Reasons Why Public High Schools Don’t Teach Critical Thinking
The following warning should be affixed atop every computer in America’s schools: Proceed at your own risk. Don’t accept as true what you’re about to read. Some of it is fact; some of it is opinion masquerading as fact; and the rest is liberal, conservative, or mainstream propaganda. Make sure you know which is which […]
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