Blood for the Future

The Northern Ireland “Troubles” in Les Levine’s Resurrection

These events form part of the Holy Cross Dispute, a period of eight months of acute sectarian tension in Northern Ireland. During this time, Holy Cross Girls Primary School, a Catholic elementary school in a Protestant enclave of Ardoyne, north Belfast, was picketed by hundreds of loyalist Protestant protestors trying to stop ...
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Silenus’ Cup, Drained by AI

A Review of The Dead Walk into a Bar

Set within an ‘orbital facility’ in an un-specified future, the film opens inside a cavernous hall. The scene carries a strange echo for visitors to Steyerl’s show: a musty provincial gallery, sepulchrally lit, clad in dark wood -- that is, much like the Armory, where the entire work was filmed. ...
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The Reviews Are In

Will Durant’s The Life of Greece

Will Durant’s The Life of Greece, the second volume in the “Story of Civilization” series, was published in 1939, a grim year for “Western Civilization.” Despite -- or perhaps because -- the book was such a popular success, it was reviewed in a handful of academic journals. Two reviews of this volume ...
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Why Intellectual Property Rights Matter

A review of Roberto Unger’s ‘The Knowledge Economy’

The structure of The Knowledge Economy roughly mirrors this dual ambition. The 287-page work of pure theory is organized into digestible, cumulative micro-chapters. The first seven theorize the structure of the knowledge economy. Chapters eight and nine turn to the issues of inequality and precarity. The following eight chapters look at ...
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Did Naomi Wolf’s ‘Outrages’ Really Deserve to Be Met With Such… Outrage?

Despite the backlash, Wolf’s story of how love and words are silenced is an important account of the misery institutionalized homophobia causes.

When the BBC’s Matthew Sweet called out Naomi Wolf mid-interview, some listeners would not have been hugely surprised. It appeared to be just another manifestation of what Casper Schoemaker, writing on the bestselling Beauty Myth in 2004, called “Wolf’s Overdo and Lie Factor (WOLF),” this time surfacing in Wolf’s new book,Outrages: Sex, Censorship, ...
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What’s Missing In Naomi Wolf’s ‘Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love’

The moment at which I genuinely threw the book across the room was thirty pages from the end.

In 2013, when I heard Naomi Wolf give a talk about the Ph.D. research she was then pursuing at Oxford, my first reaction was panic. Twenty-three years old, I had recently completed what is still the most intense, all-consuming experience of my life: researching and writing a 75,000-word undergraduate ...
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How the North American Free Trade Agreement ruined Nourishment

A Review of “Eating NAFTA”

Eating NAFTA demonstrates the urgency of responding to a clear and yet mostly invisible health crisis that manifests across borders. It offers tools for rethinking existing approaches to trade and food systems from a transnational, intersectional and structural perspective that shifts the blame that public institutions have placed on individuals (particularly ...
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Permanent Mystifications

The Story of Post-Conceptual Art in Slovakia

Prague City Gallery’s “Probe 1: The Story of Slovak (Post)Conceptual Art” (12th December 2018 - 24th March 2019) came and went unnoticed. This is hardly surprising, despite the prime location of the museum’s 13th-century Stone Bell House site: a corner of the Old Town Square beneath the piercing spires of the Church ...
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Permanent Mystifications

Lorraine Hansberry and the Long Black Freedom Struggle

Imani Perry’s ‘Looking for Lorraine’ Review

The play A Raisin in the Sun is one of the most recognizable stage productions in the last 60 years of American history. Many Americans have encountered it -- whether on Broadway, at a local production, in film, or in a high school or college classroom. Yet, the person who wrote it, ...
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Lorraine Hansberry and the Long Black Freedom Struggle

How to Do It

Sex Education and the “Sex Life”

In 1696, in Somerset county in southwest England, a schoolboy named John Cannon and his friends took their lunchtime break on the banks of a river near their schoolhouse. Unlike other uneventful riverside lunches, though, this day was memorable enough for Cannon to record in his memoirs. An older boy ...
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How to Do It

Warhol: The Revolution that Failed

A review of the Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again exhibition at The Whitney Museum.

The recent reappearance of Andy Warhol’s paintings, films, sculptures, and silkscreens at The Whitney in New York City reminded me of the writings of Arthur C. Danto (1924-2013), a professor of philosophy at Columbia University as well as art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009. Like many philosophers of his ...
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Warhol: The Revolution that Failed

Reflections of a Federal Judge from Jim Crow Mississippi

A Jo Freeman Review of ‘Won Over’

When I was working in Mississippi for SCLC in 1966, I would not have believed that any of the young white men I saw on the streets (mostly harassing us) would ever reject white supremacy. They appeared as dedicated to its domination as sports fans are to their clubs. William Alsup writes that ...
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Reflections of a Federal Judge from Jim Crow Mississippi