Anthropocene Denial Bingo

“We’re fucked. The only question is how soon and how badly.” (16) This is the refreshingly candid way Roy Scranton starts his small, intense book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (City Lights Books, 2015). For Scranton, the first and last job of critical thought is to interrupt habits of ...
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Anthropocene Denial Bingo

After the Victory of The Law and Justice Party

Envisioning a perfect right-wing religious Poland

Karl Marx famously claimed that history repeats itself twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. Sadly, the recent parliamentary elections in Poland seem to show that actually the opposite can happen as well. Although the 2005 parliamentary victory of the Law and Justice (PiS) party ended in a short-lived coalition ...

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After the Victory of The Law and Justice Party

Neoliberal B Team Win Canadian Election

Assessing the conservative defeat

The decisive defeat of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government was the big news of the 2015 Canadian election. Harper resigned as party leader, and the dirty laundry of his heavily controlled campaign is now being aired publicly. The Harper reelection campaign drew deeply on racist and Islamaphobic politics, attacking ...

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Neoliberal B Team Win Canadian Election

Romanian Tragedy, Romanian Miracle

Glimmers of hope in European politics

On Friday night a heavy metal concert at a downtown Bucharest night club burst literally into flames, as a spark from a pyrotechnic display set off a conflagration that caused panic and pandemonium among the roughly 400 young people trapped inside. Over thirty people were burned to ...

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Romanian Tragedy, Romanian Miracle

Twenty Years after Rabin’s Death: The Oslo Illusion

Looking back in the midst of the Third Intifada

Mahmoud Abbas made headlines last month when he announced in the U.N’s General Assembly that the Palestinians would no longer “continue to be bound” by the Oslo Agreements. He had warned that he was going to drop a “bombshell,” but given that Oslo has been dead for several years already, ...

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Twenty Years after Rabin’s Death: The Oslo Illusion

On the Other Side of the Berlin Wall

East Germany and the fall

It was a colleague, Jonathan Bach, who discovered that Trebor Scholz and I, both currently associate professors at the New School, happened to be serving in the German military 25 years ago -- but on opposite sides of the wall! As such, he brought us together for the ...

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