The Dilemma of a Fragmented Self

Mass migrations, language, and the future of identity

How can language create such a convoluted way of experiencing the everyday world? We can explore this phenomenon with two linked concepts: the speech act and the discourse community. ...

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The Dilemma of a Fragmented Self

A Globe, Clothing Itself with Ears

Stories of speaking with animals are as old as human history

Human ambivalence about animal language persists and is linked with our uncertainty about human status: Are we one animal among others, or does something truly set us apart? Debates over animal language are a touchstone for human uncertainties about our role in the cosmos....

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A Globe, Clothing Itself with Ears

Will the Idea of Intergenerational Justice Mobilize Us Into Climate Action?

An Interrogation of the Politics of Climate Change

As a result of these factors, climate communication strategies used thus far have just not gained traction. One of the principle questions scientists, social scientists, journalists, and media scholars are currently grappling with is: what is the best way to frame the danger of climate change in a way that ...
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We Make the Media

Why freedom of speech is a matter of choice

This essay is adapted from the opening keynote for the Future of Speech Online, held at the beautiful Knight Conference Center atop the Newseum in Washington, DC. on December 7, 2018. It’s become necessary at gatherings about the future of media to start by banning the “f” word, a word that gets a lot ...
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We Make the Media

When Psychoanalysis Needs to Adapt to the Patient

An Interview with Robert Grossmark

Psychoanalysts increasingly find themselves working with patients who seem to defy verbal and dialogic engagement. Such patients are challenging for a psychoanalytic approach that assumes that the patient relates in the verbal realm and is capable of reflective functioning. Both the classical stance of neutrality and abstinence and a contemporary ...
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When Psychoanalysis Needs to Adapt to the Patient

Why We Need More Essays About Media

And what we offer to democracy

Conversation may or may not be the soul of democracy -- but the essay is. Essays are about grey-zones, multi-layered meanings, ambiguity. These are all qualities any good autocrat detests. The autocrat wants you to absorb his one-liner, his all-encompassing propaganda slogan, his simplistic social media post. He wants you to be with him, his ...
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Why We Need More Essays About Media

Franco “Bifo” Berardi on the “Possibility of Joy”

An interview

The following is a transcription of a broadcast aired on the radio program Clinamen, which is co-conducted by Diego Sztulwark, Diego Skliar, and Natalia Genero. It was translated from the Spanish by Ana Vivaldi and Daniel Harper in 2017. Bifo casts his gaze across multiple planes: the personal and the political, the technical ...
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Franco “Bifo” Berardi on the “Possibility of Joy”

Twitter as the Medium and the Message

Or Twitter as The Public

“Describe yourself in a sentence.” Teachers commonly use this phrase as an invitation to their students, presumably to get to know them better. All your thoughts, ideas, motivations, and aspirations, all condensed into one sentence. That is a lot of editing -- your gist can only contain the ‘best’ or ...
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Twitter as the Medium and the Message

Peddling Acquiescence as Unity

Exploring the complexity of empathic communication in the face of Trump

Alongside the article’s publication, the Times’s political podcast The Run Up announced a three-episode series called “Dialogues” in which pairs of family and friends -- one Trump voter and one Clinton voter per episode -- would pose these questions to one another. Perhaps not unsurprisingly the dialogues, resting on necessarily ...
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The Utopia of Art

Composition as construction of an alternate reality

[A]nd so there was, during “4’33”,” the marking down, the scribbling of pens and pencils, and the whispering of teenage ADHD cases, and the occasional cough (which cough has to have been the most consistent instrumental timbre across all the myriad performances of “4’33””), and then gradually there was consternation among the ...
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When the Pope “Drops the F-Bomb”

Meditations on media, society, and the philosophy of language

On March 3, 2014, a stream of troubling, breaking news about Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine was interrupted by another event, this time originating in the Vatican, which similarly reached prominence in journalistic organs. This event, however, was not a child abuse scandal, papal resignation, or other such event that ...

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When the Pope “Drops the F-Bomb”