The Revolutionary Street Art of Bangladesh’s 2024 Uprising

In Dhaka, layers of graffiti offer a timeline of hope

Inspired by a popular insurrection against Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly autocratic 15-year tenure as prime minister of Bangladesh, in July 2024, US-based Bangladeshi artist Debashish Chakrabarty produced and circulated online more than 100 posters illustrating the symbols, martyrs, and demands of the movement. He urged protesters around the world to copy ...
Read More
The Revolutionary Street Art of Bangladesh’s 2024 Uprising

The New Political Theology

Disestablishing the Establishment Clause

The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Strictly ...
Read More
The New Political Theology

A Martyr and a Meme

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Walter Benjamin’s politics of spectacle should serve as a warning to Trump’s America

Within minutes of the deadly shot, millions of viewers across the digital public sphere saw right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s last moments in full graphic horror, from multiple angles. Each clip was pared down to shareable content. His death made him at once a martyr and meme. German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing ...
Read More
A Martyr and a Meme

Academic Freedom in a Time of Destruction: Reconsidering Extramural Speech

The protection of extramural speech is crucial for understanding the relationship of democracy to higher education

In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 US presidential election, before Donald Trump took office and started to threaten universities with the withdrawal of federal grants, it was already clear that academic freedom had become increasingly disregarded by university administrations. It is difficult to make an argument that will not ...
Read More
Academic Freedom in a Time of Destruction: Reconsidering Extramural Speech

The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia

On evangelical anti-intellectualism in the Republican Party

For the first time in American history, a major political party has a vested interest in a low-education electorate. This astonishing fact has inspired remarkably little discussion. Religion has a lot do with it. The Republican Party courted evangelical Protestants for decades, but the client eventually captured the patron. The party ...
Read More
The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia

Trump vs. the Fed

Or how history is forcing the question of a democratic politics of central banking

Donald Trump’s move to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook “for cause,” escalates his long-running battle with America’s central bank. The news has triggered outrage. In the pages of the FT, David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center for Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, warned: “President Trump seems determined to ...
Read More
Trump vs. the Fed

The Revolution Against Legitimacy

To the new revolutionary class, legitimacy itself is an unjust claim of power

“[Stalin] changed the old political and especially revolutionary belief expressed popularly in the proverb “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” into a veritable dogma: “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.”—Hannah Arendt We are living through a revolution, though not the kind we are used to. Most today ...
Read More
The Revolution Against Legitimacy

Lula 3.0 and the Austerity Trap

The Left in power, the Right in control

Campaigning for his third term as president in 2022, Lula da Silva ran on a straightforward message: making Brazil “happy again.” Now, halfway through his third term, macroeconomic indicators paint a fairly rosy picture of the country’s trajectory under his administration: GDP growth exceeded expectations, and the unemployment rate fell ...
Read More
Lula 3.0 and the Austerity Trap

What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border

In an ancient forest, tourists and people on the move walk parallel paths

On the narrow roads of the Białowieża Forest, the last primeval forest in Europe, military vehicles occupy the space with the roar of their engines. A line of cars on the forest road signals the presence of a mobile police checkpoint at the Polish-Belarusian borderland. A border guard carefully stares ...
Read More
What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border