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Freedom in the Absence of Social Convention
In reviewing Arturo Fontaine‘s La Vida Doble, “a harrowing examination of violence during the Pinochet period,” whose heroine is Lorena, “a female terrorist who is tortured, changes sides, and becomes...
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Why Get Arrested? Why Perform Civil Disobedience?
A Facebook friend of mine asked in response to my posts and photos about yesterday’s protest at the Israeli mission to the UN: It seems as though you all knew you were going to get arrested and almost...
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A Day in Gaol, Part Deux: Notes on Police, Precincts, and Penality
Spending a day in jail has some social scientific value for the temporarily detained; it enables a closer, albeit short-lived, look at the systems of policing and criminal justice. And because I often...
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Costas Gavras’ Missing: Harbinger of Disillusionment
A little while ago, on this blog, while writing of my reading of Alex Haley’s Roots as a schoolboy I made note of it as “a member of that group of cultural productions that changed my view of the US...
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Israel And A Jewish Solution To The Palestinian Problem
When I was eight years old, my mother told me the story of the Jews. We were on a month-long vacation, the mother of all road-trips; our destinations included the mountains and the valleys of Kashmir...
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Robespierre On The Iraq War(s)
Robespierre, in a speech to the Jacobin Club, which began on 2 January 1792, and concluded on 11 January, responding to the Girondins call for war: [T]he most extravagant idea that can arise in the...
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Steven Salaita, Palestinians, And Autobiography
Last night, along with many Brooklyn College students, faculty (and some external visitors) I attended ‘Silencing Dissent: A Conversation with Steven Salaita, Katherine Franke and Corey Robin‘,...
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Let The Fire Burn, And Ferguson
Jason Osder‘s searing Let the Fire Burn–a documentary about the tragic standoff between the radical black liberation group MOVE and the Philadelphia city administration in 1985–is ostensibly a...
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The Deadly Self-Pity Of The Police
In 1997, as a graduate teaching fellow, I began teaching two introductory classes in philosophy at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Many of my students were...
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Polygamy And Joseph Smith’s Convenient Revelations
In Under The Banner Of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Jon Krakauer cites Fawn Brodie‘s No Man Knows My History, her classic biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism: Monogamy seemed to...
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Dickipedia Was Invented For Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney‘s continued existence, his persistent and unconscionable consumption of space, oxygen, and sundry precious natural resources, has long been an airtight argument against the existence of an...
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The Pietà, The Hammer, And The Stain
In The Renaissance: A Short History, Paul Johnson writes: [Michelangelo’s] first important commission, a Pietà (Mary with the dead Christ) [was] intended for the tomb of a French cardinal in Rome…It is...
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Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah': The Holocaust Brought To The Present
One of the most distinctive features of Claude Lanzmann‘s Shoah is that it features no archival footage. Not a single second of it. There are no grainy, black-and-white flickering images of Jews being...
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An Act Of Philosophical Silencing
A few months ago, I noticed an interesting and telling interaction between a group of academic philosophers. A Facebook friend posted a little note about how one of her students had written to her...
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Naguib Mahfouz On Forgetting And Habit
In Naguib Mahfouz‘s Autumn Quail, Isa, the corrupt bureaucrat whose long, slow, and painful decline after a purge following the 1952 revolution in Egypt the novel tracks, brings back Riri, a woman of...
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The Cruelest Cut Of All: Punjabis Are Not White
In 1921, a certain John Mohammed Ali became a naturalized citizen of the US. In 1925, this grant of citizenship was contested (United States v. Ali 7 F.2d 728 (1925) by Martin J. Kilsdonk, a United...
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Women In Philosophy And Reconceptualizing Philosophical Method
This past Monday, on 20th April, Christia Mercer, the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, delivered the Philosophy Department’s annual Sprague and Taylor lecture at...
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Chatwin And Nietzsche On Metaphors, Words, And Concepts
Writing of the Yaghan people and Thomas Bridges‘ Yaghan Dictionary, Bruce Chatwin writes: Finding in primitive languages a dearth of words for moral ideas, many people assumed these ideas did not...
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John Cheever On Computer Programming
In The Wapshot Chronicle (Harper and Row, New York, 1957), John Cheever writes: There was a demand that year for Tapers and he pointed this out to Coverly as his best bet. The government would pay half...
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Donald Trump, Sabbatai Zevi, And The Unchastened Devotee
I have made note, here, of a habit of mine intended to prompt writing: Sometimes I scribble little notes to myself…prompted by observations while walking…by a passage read in a book…a scene in a movie....
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