Reviews

I can’t say that I am a huge Bob Dylan fan. I may have been born just a little too late to have been caught up in the folk craze, though I do remember singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” along with “This Land is Your Land” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” during chorus in elementary school. I have my share of Dylan discs, of course, covering all periods from the early “protest” stuff to the mid- and late-1960s electric period and onto more recent back-to-the-roots material with Love and Theft being a particular favorite. …

For nearly four decades, the manufacturing centers of the industrialized world have been in decline, their once mighty engines of mass productivity decommissioned and rendered into silent, rusting hulks. Waves of capital and (mostly white) people have streamed out of the central cities, leaving ruined landscapes in their wake. Recently however, the deconstructive narrative of a number of these beleaguered towns seems to have been recuperated, …

Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, an exhibition at The Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10021, July 12 through November 27, 2016

Like the painter Francis Bacon and the illustrator Ralph Steadman, Diane Arbus’s photographic art has often been associated with the grotesque, the disconcerting, the alien. Her haunting photos of steely-pale-eyed …

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has just published a brilliant book on the global trade in a certain kind of mushroom. As much as I’d like to report on it, I feel like I have to get my head around a previous landmark work of hers before attempting it. Here I’m thinking of her book Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2005). 

Tsing: “Capitalism, science, and politics all depend on global connections….

My prayer to the TV gods when the pilot of I Love Dick screened was “please, let it not suck!” My concern was mostly for the author of the book of the same name on which it is based – Chris Kraus. I want people to read her books. Fortunately, the TV version turned out to be its own, different, interesting thing. Hopefully Amazon will order more of it and turn it into a series. Hopefully it will steer a few more readers to the book on which it is based.

I felt a bit protective of it, for no justifiable reason, …

Yesterday in the Indy Star, Public Seminar contributing editor, Jeffrey C. Isaac, my friend and colleague, published a very important op. ed. piece. By highlighting the significant differences between Trump and his running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, the piece was written to convince Indiana Republicans not to vote for Donald Trump. …

The nation is, once again, caught up in the OJ Simpson trial because of two riveting series that revisit the case. The FX mini-series, American Crime Story, and the ESPN documentary, OJ: Made in America, provide their audiences with a level of detail and sociological interpretation that can only be achieved 20 years after the trial. …

In “The Cultural Revolution, Fifty Years Later,” recently published in Foreign Affairs, Professor Xu Youyu, the University in Exile Scholar at The New School, rightly notes that many intellectuals and officials who lived through the Chinese Cultural Revolution are quietly taking stock of the lessons and legacies of that tumultuous event. …

This video was shown at ‘The G20 of Philosophy and Economics’ in Amsterdam on April1, 2016. The event coincided with the publication of the Dutch translation of Paul Mason’s recent book ‘Post-Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future’ and the opening session was a discussion on it. After Mason’s presentation, there were short invited comments and responses to it. …

According to the 2014 United Nations World Urbanization Prospects report, some two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to reside in cities by 2050, more than double the percentage of urban dwellers that existed across the globe in 1950. To manage this growth, policymakers have embraced the notion that cities need to become ‘smart’, …