I think we need to be alert to the historical context in which we speak about violence, including structural violence. Too frequently we take physical harm and/or killing as the only paradigm of violence. But this can blind us to other forms of violence that involve humiliation and suffering. But what is even more important …
Tag Archives: new york times
The whole thing of working in all these different mediums, it’s just so that I can always be playing hooky from one of them. I can always be rebelling against my boss. Miranda July in an interview with The Believer (via)
“With her bare, alert senses she could almost hear violets grow and feel the robin’s heart beat. Like Emerson, she found in each drop of dew, in each grain of sand, a copy of a universe.” Praise for Emily Dickinson by Nardi Reeder Campion in a 1973 essay for the New York Times titled “A Delayed …
When people die in police custody or are killed by the police, there are always those who wonder what the fallen did to deserve what befell them. He shouldn’t have been walking down that street. She should have been more polite to that police officer. He shouldn’t have been playing with a toy gun in …
Baseball and Post-Modernism
Crispin Sartwell’s article about post-postmodern philosophy and the real starts with an anecdote that is too relevant to my interests not to share here: When I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins in the early 1980s, I played on the intramural softball team of the postmodern literary theorist Stanley Fish. I recall his umpiring …
There is disingenuousness on both sides. Many who oppose the death penalty, this page included, are obviously not interested in identifying more “humane” methods of execution; the idea itself is a contradiction in terms. Nor are many capital punishment supporters concerned with how much suffering a condemned person might endure in his final moments. In …
Keep cool, but care. Thomas Pynchon, V. (1961) Quoted in this NYT article: The Nobel Prize Waiting Game: A Year for Long Shots?
Goldberg’s One-Sided New Yorker Article “Undermines Transgender Identity,” And That’s Still A Euphemism
I subscribe to the New York Times digitally (mainly because it can be useful as a North American cultural studies student) and recently subscribed to their “what we’re reading” newsletter, a selection of articles from other publications NYT editors like every week. When I opened Tuesday’s newsletter, I was briefly exited. A recommended article from …
Heidegger’s Antisemitic Notes
From the New York Times: “The so-called black notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941 and named for the color of their oilcloth covers, show Heidegger denouncing the rootlessness and spirit of “empty rationality and calculability” of the Jews, as he works out revisions to his deepest metaphysical ideas in relation to political events of the …
Biological and Chemical Weapons in the US Civil War.
One can argue that the U.S. civil war was, or developed into, the first modern war, the first war that was fought in the manner that was to sadly dominate the 20th century. Maybe the ‘style’ of war has fundamentally changed again, with the fragmentation of fronts between states and terrorist groups, guerrilla warfare, or …
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