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The Ritual Roots of Animism, Drama and Sports: The Work of Jane Harrison and the Cambridge Ritualists

My friends claim that I am irreverent to the Olympian gods. My interests I am told are unduly focused on ghosts, bogies and pillar cults. I prefer savage disorders, Dionysian origins, the tearing of wild bulls to the ordered and stately ceremonial of Panathenaic processions….The gods who once mirrored human unity with nature came to […]
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The Great Whitewashing of American History Orchestrated by Generalisimo Donald Trump

Image created by Perlinator. The historian and author Gore Vidal once called the United States the “United States of Amnesia.” Nowhere is that amnesia more weaponized than in the Trump-era battle over American history. Among the many fronts in Trump’s culture wars, perhaps none is more consequential than his administration’s effort to whitewash the nation’s […]
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The Collective Creativity of Workers

Orientation One purpose of this article is to get you to think of creativity in a whole new way. Our notion of creative today is baked with the assumptions of a Romantic theory of art. These have their good points but they also limit us. In this article I want to argue that the most […]
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Does the End Matter?

Among the subjects of instruction in schools are the local language, spoken and written; the techniques of computation, arithmetic and algebra or geometry; the principles of the physical world, chemistry and physics; and the story of the country in which the school is located—unless it is a colony in which case the story of the […]
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Chomsky and UN Forewarnings Revisited
I recently attended a family affair in Upstate NY and was informed that climate change articles, like this one, are too negative, causing close relatives to shutdown and going so far as to ignore articles, too gloomy, too negative, do something more positive. My response: Analyzing the planet’s climate system by studying peer-reviewed scientific publications […]
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The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part I

Do religion and nationalism compete with each other? Do they replace each other? Do they amplify each other and drive each other forward? Do they exist in symbiosis? Theorists of nationalism have struggled with this question. At one extreme of the spectrum is the early work of Elie Kedourie (1960), who argued that nationalism is a modern, […]


