Essays Archive - Page 27 of 131

Not about NATO

To frame NATO as a security threat to Russia caters to Kremlin propaganda

February 23, 2022 • by Mariia Shynkarenko

On Monday 21 Feb, on the eighth anniversary of the victory of the Euromaidan, Russian president Vladimir Putin effectively declared war on Ukraine. To justify this recklessness, he gave an hour-long pseudo-historical rant that portrayed Ukraine as an artificial state that owes its existence to Russia. He also accused the ...

Europe & Central Asia

Preparing for an Apocalypse

A manual from Ukraine

February 23, 2022 • by Angelina Kariakina

It’s important we develop a plan to give people a genuine feeling of agency—a feeling which, by the way, is exactly what Ukraine as a state needs while the rest of the world discusses its fate....

COVID-19

Habermas on the Legitimacy of Lockdown

Habermas argued that the state’s duty to protect life outweighed all individual rights. His critics accused him of authoritarianism.

February 23, 2022 • by Peter J. Verovšek

Jürgen Habermas recently argued that the pandemic measures of the German government hadn’t gone far enough. To weigh the state’s duty to protect life against other rights and freedoms was unconstitutional, he warned. In the ensuing controversy, critics accused him of authoritarianism. ...

Social Research

Solitary

In the face of utter despair that goes with solitary confinement, tiny red ants are the only sign of hope

February 23, 2022 • by Arthur Longworth

Focus. I pull my thoughts back from the edge of the abyss. You have to keep your mind on a short leash in this place—that is, you must rein it in when you feel it slipping, or risk losing it altogether. Strange things happen to minds here. Weak minds break ...

Philosophy

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Making a case for revising the future

February 22, 2022 • by Lina Nasr El Hag Ali

Imagining alternative futures could help breach some of today’s most pressing political and philosophical concerns: for example, the Anthropocene and environmental catastrophe, renewed calls for decolonization against the rise of fascism(s) around the world, our complicity with imperialist violence abroad and political impotence at home. ...

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Past Present

Canada’s Freedom Convoy

Past Present Podcast, Episode 314

February 22, 2022 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: A convoy of truckers and their allies, totaling about 8,000 people, hasgathered in the center of Ottawa, Canada, in protest of what they consider excessive COVID prevention policy. Natalia referred to Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column about the protest, ...

Feminism

Reading Your bell hooks

Alone, together, or in community, this Black feminist icon always insisted on reading as a transformative act

February 16, 2022 • by Judy Pryor-Ramirez

bell hooks was blessed, and I believe that she transitioned to the land of milk and honey knowing how important her work was for so many people’s lives. Reading bell hooks is an action and a step towards personal and social transformation. ...

Social Research

Take Me Out with the Crowd

On loneliness and Hannah Arendt

February 16, 2022 • by Christian Sheppard

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism tells the true crime story of the twentieth century. Contrary to the basic requirements of human condition, Loneliness is one of the fundamental experiences of human life. ...

Higher Ed

The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Sexual harassment is a normal feature of the current power arrangement. What will you do about it?

February 15, 2022 • by Hannah Leffingwell

This is because the system is built to protect, enable, and encourage harassers. Graduate students, whose cheap labor is used by the university to buttress the outrageous salaries of star faculty and senior administrators, are often broke, disempowered, terrified, and exhausted, even prior to being sexually harassed....

The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Interviews

The University Ate My Neighborhood

A conversation with urbanist and cultural historian Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities

February 15, 2022 • by Davarian L. Baldwin and Claire Potter

Claire Potter sat down with urbanist Davarian L. Baldwin to discuss his new book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021), to hash out what these relationships do to reshape our cities....

Education

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

In this excerpt, Davarian L. Baldwin introduces his new book, The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities

February 15, 2022 • by Davarian L. Baldwin

I never thought a university would foretell the future of our cities. But there I was, on a December afternoon in 2003, stepping out into the brisk South Side air after hours holed away in the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. I immediately heard chants of protest and saw people ...

Politics

What Freud Would Say About Left-Wing Infighting

Sanders supporters and others need to resist the temptation to retreat into ideological purity

February 15, 2022 • by Todd Gitlin

At the 2008 reunion of veterans of the 1968 Columbia occupation, I remember sitting near him at one session and watching the abuse he patiently took from aging movement heavies who voiced their anger at him for having raised doubts, in his books, about the wisdom of their most violent ...

Essays

Not about NATO

To frame NATO as a security threat to Russia caters to Kremlin propaganda

Preparing for an Apocalypse

A manual from Ukraine

Habermas on the Legitimacy of Lockdown

Habermas argued that the state’s duty to protect life outweighed all individual rights. His critics accused him of authoritarianism.

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Making a case for revising the future

Canada’s Freedom Convoy

Past Present Podcast, Episode 314

Reading Your bell hooks

Alone, together, or in community, this Black feminist icon always insisted on reading as a transformative act

The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Sexual harassment is a normal feature of the current power arrangement. What will you do about it?

The University Ate My Neighborhood

A conversation with urbanist and cultural historian Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

In this excerpt, Davarian L. Baldwin introduces his new book, The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities

What Freud Would Say About Left-Wing Infighting

Sanders supporters and others need to resist the temptation to retreat into ideological purity

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