Uncategorized Archives - Page 2 of 53

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Drone Strikes and Civilian Casualties

Will admitting a “tragic mistake” change the way we wage war?

September 21, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

Last Friday, Marine Corps General Frank McKenzie of U.S. Central Command admitted that the August 29 drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that the U.S. had claimed hit ISIS-K fighters had instead killed 10 civilians, including seven children. This “tragic mistake,” as he called it, at the very end of the ...

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Retiring Does Not Mean Throwing in the Towel

Closing one chapter on work allows so much else to begin

August 11, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

_____ I’m out of there! I’ve stepped down as a tenured professor at The New School for Social Research. I came up through the ranks, advancing from Assistant Professor to Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology. Along the way, there were stints as Chair of the Department of Sociology and Liberal ...

Retiring Does Not Mean Throwing in the Towel

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Slavery Made Economic Thinking Possible

An excerpt from “Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic”

June 14, 2021 • by Jennifer L. Morgan

_____ In the 1640s, as a child, Elizabeth Keye found herself misidentified on an estate in Virginia. A white boy named John Keye called her “Black Besse.” Overhearing it, the overseer’s wife “checked him and said[,] Sirra you must call her Sister for shee is your Sister,” whereupon “the said John Keye ...

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Why We Should Ban Pets

It’s time to retire the cages, aquariums, and leashes for good

May 12, 2021 • by Hannah Arsenault-Gallant

_____ Adoption centres, breeders, and rescue facilities have experienced a surge in demand for companion animals during the COVID-19 pandemic. The dramatic rise in companion animals during the pandemic is no coincidence. Public health measures have forced the relocation of office workers to the comfort of their homes, making it convenient ...

Capitalism

The Communism of Love

How the COVID pandemic has revealed anew the importance of Marx’s Gemeinwesen

May 5, 2021 • by Richard Gilman-Opalsky

_____ Marx was transfixed by the Gemeinwesen, a German word meant to grasp the essence of human community, the state of human relations. Marx did not think a world of exchange built around the relation of labor to capital made for the healthiest Gemeinwesen, and he wanted a different one. He ...

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Resilience in a Time of Plague: A Personal Account

During a crisis, the people who cope best are those who help others

April 21, 2021 • by Roxana Toma

_____ You probably heard this slogan throughout the pandemic – “We’re all in this together.” But is that really true? After all, the affluent and the young had a radically different experience of the pandemic than the poor and elderly. And how do we help ourselves when we are experiencing an ...

Resilience in a Time of Plague: A Personal Account

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Vietnamese in America

A cross generational conversation about culture and identity

April 21, 2021 • by Phuong-Cac Nguyen

_____ I hadn’t fully grasped it until most recently, but my identity has always been amorphous. When I came of age in Southern California, I didn’t feel so different than my fellow Gen X peers. I was lost, perpetually grumpy, restless — which wasn’t different from what I was seeing in ...

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Why Asian Americans Need a Language Access Revolution, Now

Taking stock in the wake of the Atlanta spa murders

April 15, 2021 • by Jenny Choi

_____ On Tuesday, March 16, a white man killed eight people – among them six Asian American women – at a massage parlor in Georgia. Almost a week later, the 911 caller’s desperately hushed pleadings won’t leave my head. When I replay the woman’s voice – turning hard, Korean corners on hanging ...

Why Asian Americans Need a Language Access Revolution, Now

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What A Korean American Will Find in Minari

And what most Americans will miss about the Oscar-nominated film

April 15, 2021 • by Hannah H. Kim

_____When Parasite came out, I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. Looking back, it was for the same reason that I – a philosophy graduate student at Stanford – resisted Asian philosophy for six years: I didn’t want to be a typical Asian taking interest in Asian things. I wanted to ...

What A Korean American Will Find in <em>Minari</em>

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Wounds That Don’t Heal

A new movie about the Iraq war reminds us that soldiers have always been left to cope with the visible and invisible toll of war

April 15, 2021 • by Dillon J. Carroll

_____ On Friday March 12, Anthony and Joe Russo’s film Cherry was released on Apple TV+. Adapted from Nico Walker’s mostly autobiographical novel of the same name, it stars Tom Holland as Cherry, a Cleveland native who enlists in the Army and deploys to Iraq. There, he is traumatized by the ...

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Why Phillip Roth is a Great Jewish and a Great American Novelist

A new biography captures the whole man: his kindnesses, his pettiness and his prickeries

April 6, 2021 • by Mitchell Abidor

_____ There will undoubtedly be eye-rolling in some quarters over Blake Bailey’s 800-page biography of Philip Roth, that self-hating Jew/misogynist/self-absorbed relic of an era of history that America has (perhaps) outgrown. And yet, Philip Roth: The Biography – not a biography, the biography – is a book as sensibly, sensitively, and insightfully ...

Why Phillip Roth is a Great Jewish <em>and</em> a Great American Novelist

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The New Essentialism

Old ways of thinking are returning–again

March 25, 2021 • by Simon Garnett

_____ If we share the assumption that every culture is necessarily incomplete in itself and that there is no such thing as a self-contained, homogeneous culture, then the very definition of a given culture has to include what I would call inter-translatability. In other words, being-in-translation is an essential defining feature ...