Reviews Archives - Page 12 of 17

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The My Mother / My Self: Presidential Election of 2016

Susan Bordo’s The Destruction of Hillary Clinton

September 17, 2017 • by Nell Painter

Bordo devotes three and a half early pages to Clinton’s appeal to women her age, and Bordo’s age, and mine -- we old women who still evoke wicked stepmothers, witches, shrill voices, and physical ugliness (18-22). In 2016, Democratic women divided by generation, with older women pro-Hillary and younger women ...

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For and Against the Anthropocene

A review of ‘Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today’

September 15, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Since the turn of the 21st century, many scientists have been arguing for the designation of a new epoch in Earth's geological history, which they term the Anthropocene in acknowledgment of the impact of humans on the planet's evolution. While not yet officially approved by the International Union of Geological ...

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The Body in Space/Trauma in the Body

A Review of Roxane Gay’s ‘Hunger’

August 17, 2017 • by Lynne Peskoe-Yang

Roxane Gay’s first book-length memoir, Hunger, is about space: the space that certain bodies are allowed to occupy, and the world’s response when they are unable or unwilling to fit inside it. In tender, explosive prose, Gay writes of the systemic medical dismissal and the social and sexual ostracism that ...

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Defending Abortion Without “Rights”

A Review of Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason

August 14, 2017 • by Juniper Alcorn

In Foucault’s Futures, Penelope Deutscher stages critical discussions between Foucault and his critics and intellectual descendants, bringing reproduction into focus as an issue of biopolitics. The “future” of Foucault is contained in two questions: first, in what sense is reproduction present in Foucault’s work and how has it eluded or ...

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What Are the Costs of Libertarianism?

Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, Revisited

August 10, 2017 • by Claire Potter

Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: the Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking Press, 2017.) Democracy in Chains, historian Nancy MacLean's account of James McGill Buchanan and public choice economics, has caused an unusual stir in the few months since its publication. You may have followed the lengthy ...

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We Are Swarming, Again.

Thoughts on William Connolly’s new book, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming

August 7, 2017 • by Richard Porteous

‘Swarming’ has a rich and complex history in political and philosophical literatures. That history percolates in political theorist William Connolly’s recent book Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming in which he proposes a ‘Politics of Swarming,’ and even resonates in his writing style. The question of ‘swarming’ intersects ...

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How Buddhism and Marxism Can End Our Suffering

Interdependence as a Response to Global Crisis

August 6, 2017 • by Hawa Allan

Terry Gibbs, Why the Dalai Lama is a Socialist: Buddhism and the Compassionate Society (Plymouth, UK: Zed Books, 2017). Distributed in the United States by the University of Chicago Press. Paper: 19.95. "I’m not going to argue in this book that we all need to be Buddhist Marxists," writes Terry Gibbs in ...

How Buddhism and Marxism Can End Our Suffering

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We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

A Review of Adam Greenfield’s Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

July 23, 2017 • by James Daniel

As new technologies course towards cultural and economic supremacy, Silicon Valley CEOs and digital advocates have become increasingly circumspect about the question of risk. Many leaders in the industry like Apple CEO Tim Cook have effectively banished the word from their lexicon. As he noted in a recent keynote address ...

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The Controversy Over Democracy in Chains

A Review Essay

July 18, 2017 • by Andrew Seal

You may be aware that the new book by Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking, 2017) has received a lot of notice over the past week or two. Some of this notice has been very positive, but much more has been ...

The Controversy Over Democracy in Chains

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The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

Poetry, Art, and the New Spirit of Capitalism

July 16, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Updating Walter Benjamin -- whose famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' on which the title of his book riffs -- poet and critic Jasper Bernes seeks nothing less than a complete reconsideration of poetry and art over the past 50 years, coinciding with the ...

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

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Practice Makes Practicable

From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art

July 11, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Clocking in at nearly 900 pages of dense text plus index, Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art, edited by artist and researcher Samuel Bianchini and curator and critic Erik Verhagen, is a door-stopper of a book. Its ambition is equal to its mass -- it proposes to rewrite postwar Western ...

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Revisiting the Scourge of Human Folly

A Review of Charles Ludlam’s ‘The Artificial Jungle’

June 22, 2017 • by Dara Levendosky

“A theme that threatens to destroy one’s whole value system. Treat the material in a madly farcical manner without losing the seriousness of the theme. Show how paradoxes arrest the mind. Scare yourself a bit along the way.” – Charles Ludlam During the 1960s, New York City experienced a surge in ...