Reviews Archives - Page 8 of 18

Reviews

What Do Walls Do?

Reflections on William Callahan’s “Great Walls” — and on Filmmaking as an Ethnographic Method

December 5, 2019 • by Jiyoung Cho

What Callahan spurs us to challenge is the premise that walls are “problems” that need to be “solved” (Callahan 2018, 460). When Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it was meant to signal the end of the Cold War rivalry between a totalitarian East and a democratic West, a victory ...

History

The Syrian Crisis in Longer View

A review of Fragile Nation, Shattered Land

October 28, 2019 • by Spenser Rapone

Reviewed by Spenser R. Rapone The future of the Syrian Arab Republic, still embroiled in a brutal civil war, is today a topic of raging debate in the Middle East and beyond. Taking the long view, James A. Reilly’s Fragile Nation, Shattered Land: The Modern History of Syria recounts the origins ...

Art & Design

Fleabag, Let Things Get Lost

Wonder, confusion, and why film needs more of it.

September 19, 2019 • by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

I want to talk about wonder in film. Wonder isn’t some starry-eyed luxury. It’s tantamount to messy, confused, vulnerable searching where all the possibilities of one’s world are up in the air, and one’s bearing is anxious. Wonder peeks out in mainstream film, but filmmakers should follow it and see ...

Feature

The Political and Intellectual Entanglements of Post-Truth

A review of Steve Fuller’s Post-Truth: Knowledge as Power Game

September 18, 2019 • by Pietro Daniel Omodeo

Three years after the Oxford English Dictionary made the term "post-truth" the word of the year, we still live in a time in which, according to the definition, “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” As both Nicholas Baer and Maggie ...

Feature

The Demons of Neoliberalism

Adam Kotsko’s Political Theology

September 11, 2019 • by Luke Mergner

This critique was left tantalizingly underdeveloped in The Prince of this World. How could more freedom make us less free? Neoliberalism's Demons answers this question by reading neoliberalism through the lens of political theology. The result is not a new history of neoliberalism but a refocusing on how such an economic system makes ...

Art & Design

Blood for the Future

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

September 4, 2019 • by Max L. Feldman

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 ...

Art & Design

Silenus’ Cup, Drained by AI

A Review of The Dead Walk into a Bar

August 30, 2019 • by Kanad Chakrabarti

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. ...

Education

The Reviews Are In

Will Durant’s The Life of Greece

August 14, 2019 • by Lora Burnett

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 ...

Reviews

Why Intellectual Property Rights Matter

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

July 11, 2019 • by Ella Coon

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 ...

Reviews

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.

July 3, 2019 • by Emma Rees

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, ...

Reviews

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.

June 25, 2019 • by Emily Rutherford

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 ...

Feature

How the North American Free Trade Agreement ruined Nourishment

A Review of “Eating NAFTA”

June 13, 2019 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso

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 ...