On the Chelsea Bombing

Trying to Think about Terrorism and Everyday Life

Saturday night, September 17, 2016, a bomb exploded on Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan injuring twenty-nine people. Soon after, unexploded devices were found on Twenty-Seventh Street. Over in New Jersey, one of three pipe bombs exploded just before a running event in Seaside earlier on Saturday, and then on Sunday, in ...
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On the Chelsea Bombing

How to Effectively Ban Abortion

On the Polish Black Monday Strike and its Consequences

This week saw a massive mobilization of women in Poland (and elsewhere) against a proposed total abortion ban in the country.  On Monday, women refused en masse to go to work or school, striking both economically and socially, in order to stop the proposal, which would have refused abortion to ...
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How to Effectively Ban Abortion

Football and Protesting: America’s Pastimes

With the start of autumn in the United States comes apple pie, fall foliage, and football season. The National Football League’s (NFL) 2016 season was kicked off by an unusual symbolic protest that has spurred a national conversation. Colin Kaepernick, a biracial quarterback on the San Francisco 49ers, decided to ...
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Football and Protesting: America’s Pastimes

Rap’s Civility Game

What we can do as artists is inspire people to give a fuck -Vic Mensa, from “16 Shots,” a song about the killing of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police. I should start this letter with a disclaimer. I am not a student of music, rap, or Black activism.  All that I ...
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Rap’s Civility Game

Hannah Arendt on American “Social Slavery”

A few years after fleeing the fascist tidal wave in Europe and finding refuge in New York City, Hannah Arendt penned a letter to her mentor and confidant Karl Jaspers, commenting briefly on the peculiarities of American politics and society. She remarked, “The fundamental contradiction of the country is political ...

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Hannah Arendt on American “Social Slavery”

Eleven Theses on American Democracy

1 The main defect of actually-existing democracy in America is that it does not actually exist. Or, rather, it exists in a stage-managed way: economic, military, and policy elites jockey for power, bypassing the citizenry, through the ubiquity of money and the subtle and not-so-subtle influence of the mainstream media, which ...
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Eleven Theses on American Democracy

‘We, The People’ In Polish

One country’s response to a right-wing takeover

The Committee in Defense of Democracy (Komitet Obrony Demokracji, or KOD) appeared to start suddenly out of thin air. It is now the biggest mass mobilization of Polish citizens since the days of Solidarity 25 years ago. On the one hand, this is clearly a response to the electoral victory ...

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‘We, The People’ In Polish

Populism, Representation, and Sanders

A Reply to Mueller

In a recent article published on Public Seminar, Jan-Werner Mueller affirmed that populism is by its very nature not only anti-elitist, but also anti-pluralist: “Populists claim that they, and only they, represent the people.” He then attacked the undemocratic tendency populist politicians show when they lose the elections: they “begin to ...

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Populism, Representation, and Sanders