Paris was ambushed by seven separate terrorist actions last night, a horrific set of events eerily reminiscent of both the Charlie Hebdo massacre less than a year ago and the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Any one of them– the mass shootings in various restaurants and bars, the suicide bombing outside of a soccer match at the Stade de…
Read More[This is the second installment of my series The Wired Election, employing insights gained from HBO television series The Wire to interpret 2016 Presidential election campaign events, persons and states of affair. The cheese stands alone.] Like many of my fellow web-citizens, I found myself doing a number of dramatic double-takes on Wednesday morning as I watched “news”-casters review…
Read MoreThere are certain works of art in every medium– literature, theater, photography, sculpture, film, painting, music, et al.– that somehow manage, through an impossible-to-determinately-calculate alchemical combination of human creativity, the raw materials of Nature, and some other mysterious thing we might generically point toward and say “meaning” or “truth,” to reach beyond the mere representation…
Read MoreThis is the second installment of my Reading Coates posts, offering some reflections on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me in light of our summer reading group’s discussion of the same. You can read Part 1 here. Before I jump right into Chapter 2, I want to take a moment to comment upon what I…
Read MoreLove did NOT win on Friday when the Supreme Court declared (so-called) “marriage equality” a Constitutional right in its Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Make no mistake: there were a lot of people/interests/agendas that did win yesterday, innumerably more that lost, but “love” wasn’t even a lowly grunt in that battle. Neither were “dignity,” “respect,” “tolerance,” “acceptance” and least of…
Read MoreThe disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…
Read MoreThe printing press, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane: each in their own way radically shrunk the world, diminished the power of mere distance to maintain our strangeness to one another. Yet, arguably, no human innovation has served as a greater tool for transcending Nature’s most seemingly impregnable boundaries, space and time, than the World…
Read MoreAs someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I’ve nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with…
Read More“Democracy must always be severe. Without either desire or dread of paradox, we may go even further. Democracy must always be unpopular. It is a religion, and the essence of a religion is that it constrains. Like every other religion, it asks men to do what they cannot do; to think steadily about the important…
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