The Democrats’ Dilemma

Looking ahead to 2020

Although the crucial mid-term elections are a mere two weeks away, it never takes long before most political conversations turn to the question of the 2020 Democratic nominee. So while the outcome of 2018’s contests is still very much up in the air, let’s focus on an election still two ...
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The Democrats’ Dilemma

The Gray Beauty of Christine Hallquist

Transgender, the non-binary and the Radical Center

Last Friday, I came across an intriguing profile of a particularly attractive woman, Christine Hallquist, the transgender Democratic Party candidate for Governor of the state of Vermont. She is running behind in the polls. Nonetheless, how she is running, as well as who she is, I find luminous. “My whole life has been ...
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The Gray Beauty of Christine Hallquist

This Fight Would Take Place Someday

An impassioned appeal for resoluteness in the face of right wing reaction

This text is for those who weep for what is about to come. It was written for those who perceive the darkest of nights arriving with its violence, its scorn and its appetite for vengeance. Because in these moments only two alternatives seem possible: escape and melancholy. We know the ...
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This Fight Would Take Place Someday

How Does Animation Change our Concept of Life and What Kind of Ethics Does it Require?

A Conversation with Media Historian and Theorist Deborah Levitt

Public Seminar (PS): Deborah, in your recently published book The Animatic Apparatus. Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image you claim that animation is the dominant medium of our time and propose the concept of the animatic apparatus as a dispositif, that is, as a kind of organizing mechanics for contemporary culture. Can ...
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How Does Animation Change our Concept of Life and What Kind of Ethics Does it Require?

What is the Crisis a Crisis of?

To characterize our republic’s predicament as one of democracy is an authoritarian fantasy

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic in the Age of Trump: A Symposium Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic is not so much a book as a collection, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, of three essays and an interview that first appeared, individually, in the years between 1969 and 1971. Three of ...
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What is the Crisis a Crisis of?

In Search of an Ethics for the Age of Animation

An Excerpt from Media Historian and Theorist Deborah Levitt’s Latest Book

In her recently published book The Animatic Apparatus. Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image media historian and theorist Deborah Levitt claims that animation is the dominant medium of our time and proposes the concept of the animatic apparatus as an organizing mechanics for contemporary culture. In the following excerpt from ...
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In Search of an Ethics for the Age of Animation

Tempest Tossed

Is the US a ‘safe country’ for asylum-seekers?: A conversation with Professor Sean Rehaag on new challenges to the US-Canada

Under an agreement signed in 2002, Canada can return asylum-seekers to the US if they have traveled through the US or lived there prior to arriving in Canada. Recent policies north and south of the US-Canadian border pose new challenges to the agreement, as Sean Rehaag, professor at Osgoode Hall ...
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Lying as Politics in the Age of Trump

What Hannah Arendt does, and does not, anticipate under a deeply vicious presidency

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic in the Age of Trump: A Symposium Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic is not so much a book as a collection, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, of three essays and an interview that first appeared, individually, in the years between 1969 and 1971. Three of ...
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Lying as Politics in the Age of Trump

Dodging Inequality and Winning Elections

How politicians profit off the dying American Dream

The United States is one of the most economically unequal nations in the West. According to some estimates, the current levels of inequality in the U.S. are at their highest since the onset of the Great Depression. Yet although they were predicted to be a key topic in the 2016 ...
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Dodging Inequality and Winning Elections

Why I Play the Blues

A Very Brief Reflection on the Meaning of Politics and its Limits

The “Blue Monday” column began as a way of integrating the two passions of my life: politics and music and especially jazz. Readers will have noted that lately I have strayed from this purpose, and my columns have become political commentaries pure and simple. My obsession with politics is in part an ...
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Why I Play the Blues

Eco’s How to Write a Thesis

A love letter to the humanities

I first picked up Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis at the campus Barnes and Noble while writing my own. It didn’t seem particularly instructive, but I skimmed the book, already too far into the process to use Eco’s meticulous suggestions about organizing readings and archives with notecards. But his belief ...
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Eco’s How to Write a Thesis

Tempest Tossed

‘Zombie ideas’ on US Immigration: A conversation with Professor Rubén Rumbaut on false ideas that will not die

Immigrants commit more crimes? Don't learn English? Hurt the U.S. economy?  These are "zombie ideas"—false claims that refuse to die.  Professor Rubén Rumbaut sets the record straight.
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