ISIS Slaughters, Iranians Get Punished
A threat to democratic efforts in Iran
Last Tuesday, December 8, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill, supported by the White House, which, if signed into law this week, would punish Iranians for crimes they have never committed. Moreover, it would provoke the hardliners in Iran, only a few months after a nuclear deal was reached between Iran …
Shakespeare and Trump: What’s in a Name?
Thoughts on headless bodies in tombless graves
One seeks in vain for references to Shakespeare in Carly Fiorina’s Tough Choices: A Memoir (2007) and Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey (2015). There are no lessons from Shakespeare in Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us (1996). Nor are there any in her more recent books …
Agnes Heller and “Everyday Revolutions”
Portrait of a Philosopher
The forms of the southern clouds at the dawn of April 30th, 1882, are comparable to those mottled streaks on this one book he had only seen once (a Spanish edition). Following the Naturalis Historia, he recounts exactly four historically exemplary cases of prodigious memory: Cyrus …
Tunisia: Invisible Alienation, Visible Violence
A relational view of Tunisian youths
Analyzing the youth is notoriously a difficult task. How should we define this social group? Can we even speak of “the youth” in the singular? With regard to the Arab Uprisings (a phrase which I prefer to the loaded “Arab Spring”), many did not …
When will the Barred Owl of Minerva Fly?
Time is running out for Israel-Palestine
On a cold, dreary November morning in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, I finally understood why owls are seen as wise, why in the ancient world they represented Athena and Minerva, the goddesses of wisdom. On my way from an academic symposium in Great Barrington …
Going Backward in Argentina
A country is not a corporation
The election of Mauricio Macri on November 22, 2015, to the presidency in Argentina by a slim 51% to 49% over Governor Daniel Scioli marks a sharp break with 12 years of progressive government and the reconstruction of the state after the neoliberal period of the 1990s. It is a …
On Pope Francis, Climate Change, and Global Capitalism
A psychological perspective
Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Laudato si’: On Care for our Common Home, has drawn worldwide attention to climate change and its relationship to global capitalism in advance of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change to be held in Paris in late November …
Jeremy Corbyn’s Attempt to Reinvent British Labour
The changing face of the British Left
On September 12, 2015, Britain’s Labour Party elected as its leader Jeremy Corbyn, a man branded a dangerous socialist and pacifist. He won with 250,000 votes of party members and supporters, out …
The Politics of Disinviting
On education and engagement with ideas
The tactic of disinviting controversial speakers has become increasingly common across college campuses. Consider, for example, what happened to the Iranian-born human rights activist Maryam Namazie (a prominent anti-racist activist and a central committee member of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran), who was …
Benjamin in Jerusalem
The Middle East as crisis and critique
This month, two conferences and one exhibition dedicated to Walter Benjamin’s legacy are descending on Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Because of an unhealthy mix of political considerations, security measures, and academic snobbery, I will partake in none of them, despite my deep roots in this troubled land and my recent book on Benjamin. …