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On Voting ‘Yes’ On The CUNY Strike Authorization Vote
Yesterday, like many of my colleagues at the City University of New York I voted ‘Yes’ on our union’s strike authorization vote. (The voting period ends May 11th; at that time, the PSC-CUNY will be...
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Kōbō Abe’s ‘Woman in The Dunes’ And The Scientist’s Existentialist Despair
Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes wears and displays its existentialist, absurdist aspirations openly and transparently; this is its terse Wikipedia summation: In 1955, Jumpei Niki, a schoolteacher...
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Fascism In American Iconography
As the United States of America prepares for the eventuality that on 20th January 2017, John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, could swear in an orange-haired fascist with a tiny...
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Robespierre On The Iraq War
In 1792, Revolutionary France debated, and prepared for, war. It was surrounded by monarchies who cared little for this upstart viper in the nest; and conversely, a sworn “enemy of the ancien regime”...
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RIP Muhammad Ali: Once And Always, The Greatest
Muhammad Ali was the first Black Muslim American I heard of. Before his name entered my immature consciousness, I did not know Americans could be Black or Muslim. (This revelation came to me during a...
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The Convenient Construction Of The Public-Private Distinction
Revolutions are public affairs; revolutionaries bring them about. They fight in the streets, they ‘man’ the barricades, they push back the forces of reaction. And then, they go home for the night, to a...
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The Battle Of Winterfell And The Napoleonic Wars
The prelude to the Battle of Winterfell looked familiar: two armies arrayed at dawn, glaring suspiciously at each other across a patch of land soon to be called a battlefield, horses nervously and...
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Brexit, Shmexit: Schadenfreude And How The Old Eat The Young
Old habits die hard. I like watching England lose: in soccer and in cricket mainly, but I’ll admit to cheering for Napoleon too. (I morbidly continue to study the Battle of Waterloo, hoping again and...
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Punjab, Palestine, Israel: Refugee Resonances
The way I first heard the story of the Jews from my mother it was about refugees, endlessly wandering from expulsion to expulsion, who had finally found a home. The first history of the creation of...
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Teflon Trump’s Terrifying Troops
I did not watch the Donald Trump acceptance speech last night; I did not want to run the risk of a disturbed night’s sleep. I did however, read a transcript that was available on the net before he went...
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Barbara Tuchman Contra Hot Takes
Barbara Tuchman kicks off the preface to her Practicing History: Selected Essays (Ballantine Books, New York, 1981) by writing: It is surprising to find, on reviewing one’s past work, which are the...
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Colin Kaepernick Will Not ‘Behave’ And That’s A Damn Good Thing
Colin Kaepernick, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers will not stand during the playing of the national anthem at NFL games. As he put it, after refusing to stand during the 49ers against the...
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A Literary Semester To Look Forward To
This fall semester, I will teach three classes; all feature literary components. They are: ‘Political Philosophy,’ ‘Philosophical Issues in Literature,’ and ‘Existentialism.’ The following are their...
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Afghanistan, Greg Mortenson, And The Temptations Of Charitable Work
In his New Yorker profile of Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, George Packer writes: Afghanistan—mountains, deserts, ungoverned spaces—has always seemed to offer a blank slate for utopian...
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The Supposed Sacral Status Of ‘National’ Symbols
Yesterday, a Facebook friend–in the course of a discussion stemming from my post criticizing David Brooks‘ claim that protests by high school football players a la Colin Kaepernick were...
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Jon Meacham On Misunderstanding Darwin And The George Bush ‘Legacy’
During the 1988 election season’s presidential debates, George H. W. Bush described his opponent, Michael Dukakis, as ‘a card-carrying member of the ACLU.’ This was supposed to be a zinger, a...
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The 2016 Elections, The ‘Bernie Revolution,’ And A Familiar Pattern
In The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 Eric Hobsbawm writes: In brief, the main shape of…all subsequent bourgeois revolutionary politics were by now clearly visible. This dramatic dialectical...
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Robert Caruso, Clinton Campaign Fellow, Advocates War Crimes (Before Denying...
Hillary Clinton’s reputation as a warmongering hawk is a well-established one. As the New York Times reported back in April in an essay titled “How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk,” she could talk the...
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Visions Of A Pogrom, One Act At A Time
Thirty two years ago this week, I climbed up to the roof of my home in New Delhi and looked out and over at my city’s skyline; once again, I saw plumes of smoke rising into the sky. A pogrom was...
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The 2016 Elections: Chronicles Of A Disaster Foretold
In October 2008, I went door-knocking in Wilkes-Barre, PA–for the Barack Obama campaign. (Earlier, I had donated a total of $100 to the Obama campaign, making two contributions of $50 each.) I was...
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