“The Young Karl Marx”

A film review

After a month in American theaters, the box office for “The young Karl Marx” was all of $58,277. This is almost incomprehensible as this is a wonderful, politically, historically and culturally rich film. A major international collaboration with first rate foreign actors, the film played at a single indie theater on ...
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“The Young Karl Marx”

Justice Through Solidarity

Bernice Yeung’s In a Day’s Work

Bernice Yeung exposes the sexual harassment and rape endemic to isolated fields, offices, and homes. Despite poverty, undocumented status, and economic desperation, women farmworkers, janitors, and domestic workers have mustered the courage to overcome shame and speak out against abuse. Yeung chronicles their personal journeys. Nonetheless, it is easy to ...
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Justice Through Solidarity

Was it all futile?

Review: John Kelly’s ‘Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain’

Among the many moral panics aroused by Jeremy Corbyn's accession to the Labour leadership has been the return of the spectre of Trotskyism. Lord Hattersley has warned that ‘the old gang is back’, referring explicitly to the Militant grouping of the 1980s; Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson has produced ‘evidence’ ...
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Was it all futile?

Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

A review of Steven Zipperstein’s new book

Steven Zipperstein’s new book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, is uncannily timely: today in particular we might appreciate the irony of fate that American anti-racism can trace one line of origin to a backwoods region of the Russian Empire. This region, Bessarabia, is among those parts of Eastern Europe ...
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Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

The 1970s Gay Sex Scandal That Enthralled Britons Is Back

What the Thorpe affair reveals about the history of elite men seeking sex and relationships with other men

When British Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe was acquitted of conspiracy to murder on June 22, 1979, the press had a field day. Thorpe allegedly paid to have his lover of fifteen years -- the horse groom and sometime model Norman Scott -- assassinated. The outing of a popular, charismatic ...
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The 1970s Gay Sex Scandal That Enthralled Britons Is Back

A Conversation on Get Out

Black Issues in Philosophy

Having recently viewed Jordan Peele’s award-winning Get Out (2017), political theorist Derefe Kimarley Chevannes was prompted to discuss the film with philosopher Lewis Gordon, whose writings include discussions of race in horror films and literature. DEREFE KIMARLEY CHEVANNES: Lewis, it’s a pleasure to have this discussion with you. As I begin, ...
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A Conversation on Get Out

A Conversation on The Black Panther

Black Issues in Philosophy

Prior to the release of The Black Panther, some well-intentioned whites on social media recommended whites to wait a week before going to see the movie so black audiences could “have their moment” without white intrusion. Greg Doukas felt this stance was senseless, and contacted Lewis Gordon to hear his thoughts. Gordon ...
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A Conversation on The Black Panther

Recognitions and Company

Reviewing Brittney Cooper’s ‘Eloquent Rage’

My feelings, for their part, go on strike against me all the time, showing up with picket signs that scream truths I’d rather not hear, all while demanding that I renegotiate terms. —Brittney Cooper (Eloquent Rage, 204) What might one want when reading a personal narrative, a memoir, a story with multiple ...
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Recognitions and Company

Taking Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy Seriously

Little Women on PBS

Spoilers ahead for plot points of Little Women — but you’ve had 150 years to read the book! Growing up, my mother kept a 19th-century copy of Louisa May Alcott’s  Little Women on a table in my parents’ bedroom. It was pleasantly heavy, and its rounded cover had embossed vines and flowers on the cover. ...
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Taking Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy Seriously

How We Review Translations

In defense of an endless task

How much more are translators faced with the finality of their task! Having deferred authorship to their source, translators still carry the full burden and responsibility of carrying not only the text on the page, but the living choices that an author made using one word, phrase, or sentence instead ...
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How We Review Translations

Is Alex Israel for Real?

Sun, sincerity and simulacra in SPF-18

The campy, nostalgic, Hollywood-inspired works of young(ish) artist Alex Israel would not be out of place as the scenery for a nineties-California-themed party, yet they regularly sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars – sometimes more – and he has had solo exhibitions in prestigious galleries globally. Israel’s first major ...
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Is Alex Israel for Real?

Fake Art and Inauthenticity in Philosophy

A review of Santiago Zabala’s ‘Why Only Art Can Save Us’

It was reported in the Washington Post that the Trump White House had asked to borrow Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting Landscape with Snow from the Guggenheim Museum in New York in order to display it in the President’s private quarters. [1] The request for the Van Gogh was refused. In its place, the Guggenheim offered ...
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Fake Art and Inauthenticity in Philosophy