Understanding Media in Dark Times

The extensions of men and women

The authoritarian threat in the United States and its resistance are actively being constituted through media, and the whole world is not only watching: it is actively participating. The Presidency of Donald Trump is not imaginable without Twitter. But also Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and, this week, the nation wide walk ...
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Understanding Media in Dark Times

The Children’s Rights Movement Takes Off

What the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child offers students

And so it begins. Finally. Students in Florida who survived a school shooting are using their voices and demanding that lawmakers listen to them. They’re joined by other young people around the country who also feel they have rights that aren’t being protected. It was only a matter of time before young people ...
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The Children’s Rights Movement Takes Off

The Thick Line

On the impossibility of coming to terms with a dark past

"We split away the history of our recent past with a thick line. We will be responsible only for what we have done to help extract Poland from her current predicament from now on."  – Tadeusz Masowiecki As Poland’s first post-Communist prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki sought to draw a thick line between the ...
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The Thick Line

Why Alexey Navalny is Important in Russia and the World

A look at how Navalny challenges Putin’s regime

The Kremlin’s political machine is shaping popular expectations about March 18th’s presidential election in Russia. For more than a year prior to the vote, the outcome of this election has been clear. In late 2016, First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Sergei Kiriyenko announced that President Putin would be ...
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Why Alexey Navalny is Important in Russia and the World

Analytic or Continental?

The psychology of becoming a philosopher in the 21st century

Divorce need not be a tragedy. Things do turn messy, however, when parents force their kids to take sides: for one and against the other. We philosophers who are coming of age in the 21st century find ourselves, unfortunately, subject to such an unhappy circumstance. To become a philosopher today implies ...
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Analytic or Continental?

Bannon at Booth

A conflict between principle and strategy?

Bannon, surely, needs no introduction, nor need we long belabor the reasons why the decision to invite him to speak at the University of Chicago proved controversial. Still, let’s note that in a letter of protest signed by over 100 members of the University of Chicago faculty, the rationale for objecting to ...
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Bannon at Booth

Pennsylvania Had a Little Lamb

A special election in PA-18 shows the limits of Trumpism

I didn't stay up last night to see Conor Lamb bring the eighteenth Pennsylvania congressional district back to the Democrats. I think this result will stand, although I think we have to presume that if the final margin is under 1,000 votes, the lawyers will go to work on it, creating ...
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Pennsylvania Had a Little Lamb

Gay Liberation

An excerpt from, ‘Before AIDS’

Public Seminar (PS) spoke to Katie Batza (KB) about her new book, Before AIDS, which charts the rise and development of a national gay community-based health network in the US, beginning in the 1970s. PS: What prompted you to write Before Aids? KB: I initially wanted to write a history of how local gay community health ...
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Gay Liberation

Biofinance

Biological foundations of capital imaginaries

Capitalism has been the subject of too many conflicting definitions for any of the claims that follow to have any purchase on truth -- understood as an adequation to the real. Beneath the numerous disagreements, however, a common substratum can be gleaned between the liberal Smithian, and the classical Marxist ...
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Biofinance

Hayden White

In memoriam

Hayden White, who passed away this week at the age of 89, was a teacher and friend of mine -- and a role model to me, intellectually and personally. I treasure the memory of our many conversations in California and Italy over the years. Knowing that I am far from ...
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Hayden White