We Refugees

In 1943 Hannah Arendt published a short essay in the Jewish periodical "The Menorah Journal" entitled We Refugees. She described in it a widespread refusal among Jews who had escaped the Nazis to call themselves “refugees." Having lost everything -- their occupation, their language, their family -- they ...

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We Refugees

Pizza Rat, a Totem of Our Time

Humans, animals, and life in 2015

For a brief moment in late September, New York City had a new celebrity: Pizza Rat. This furry character -- either endearingly repulsive, or repulsively endearing, depending on your sensibility -- appeared in most of our social media feeds after a quick-fingered commuter snapped ...

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Communicative Capitalism

It seems I got the title for my book The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso 2013) from reading Jodi Dean. I read her book Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Polity Press, 2010) in manuscript. On re-reading it, I find this: “disintegrating spectacles allow for ever more ...
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