Search Result for “the social condition”

Several days ago, at the end of March, the conservative party Kukiz15, the ruling party of Mr. Kaczynski, Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (PiS), the Polish Prime Minister, Mrs. Beata Szydlo, the national council of bishops, and the majority of MPs declared their support for banning abortion completely. A new law proposal, submitted to the Parliament last week by members of a pro-life organization, “Ordo Juris”, allows the surveillance and investigation of women who are known to be pregnant; requires a statement from women who miscarry;and enforces imprisonment between 3 months and 5 years of not only the doctor who performs the abortion, but also to the woman, regardless of how the pregnancy was initiated (i.e. whether it resulted from rape) the possible consequences for the life and health of the woman,  …

On October 24, 1973, the Egyptian military, under the command of General Hosni Mubarak, and under instructions from President Anwar Sadat, dealt an unprecedented blow to the most powerful regime in the Middle East: Israel. As the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal and established bridgeheads in the Sinai peninsula, it changed the fortunes of a hitherto shaky Egyptian presidency. Until this victory over IDF forces, Sadat had struggled to appear as the legitimate heir to the iconic Gamal Abdel Nasser, but this victory, which wiped out the stain of defeat of 1967, in one stroke turned Sadat from a hesitant, accidental president into the batal al-‘ubur or Hero of the Crossing.This event and this moniker were all the more significant in light of what followed. …

Shakespeare’s ubiquity makes adaptations of his work uniquely instructive: a critical and staging history of a familiar play creates a backdrop against which to see the vision of a filmmaker at work. …

The Republican Party has a problem. At the time I am writing (March 24, 2016), Donald Trump enjoys a clear lead in the race for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination. With nearly 60% (739) of the 1,237 delegates required for the nomination, more than both of his remaining opponents, Ted Cruz of Texas (465) and John Kasich of Ohio (143). According to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com website, Trump is expected to win all or a majority of delegates from Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Indiana, West Virginia, Washington, California, and New Jersey. If he wins significant minorities of delegations from the remaining states (Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, Montana, and New Mexico), he …

Something of Shia LaBeouf’s name stands in, perfectly, controversially, for what is now happening to us, across us, as a kind of general FKA-transing of all available terms. Around the time Caitlyn Jenner came out, there was talk of an intersectional “trans-”: a trans for race and class and even for ecographic sub-constituencies. During Occupy Wall Street, the same talk happened, and then nothing happened, and a few people said it was still on, and then nothing happened.

Intersectionality seems to be the least sustainable piece …

Walter Benjamin’s strategy in the Theses on the Philosophy of History was to focus on a non-human moment in human time and to present this instance on blast in his prose style. What I mean by “blast” here is the fact that the message had to be pirated past ideological hangers-on and historical barriers, past both Marxist and theotropic renditions, and also past the Nazi episode that might have been his more obvious target in 1940. His prose is clear but depth-charged, resonates at another frequency, still as if exploded past the imaginary proscriptions of Theodor Adorno, who was already in situ in New York …

Those seeking to explain why the response to foreigners on the part of Eastern Europeans — in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and eastern Germany — has been so severe and contemptuous have to take a look back.

It must have been shortly before we left for Germany, in 1980 or 1981. My father had taken me — I was five or six at the time — for a walk at the edge of our apartment complex in Toruń, Poland. Along the way he pointed at a deserted construction site. It was supposed to be an indoor swimming pool, but the materials and willpower needed to complete the project were obviously lacking. The pool basin had been finished many years earlier; …

While Europe struggles desperately to receive hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East, the refugee crisis we have here in the United States is increasing. Thousands of people from Central America (especially from the three “Northern Triangle” countries, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras), many of them mothers with children, many of them children alone, are coming to the United States largely through our southern borders. Although more such people came in 2014 than in any year thus far, in 2016 an even greater number is expected. They come because violent drug-related gangs have taken over in their home countries, where women …

On September 12, 1964, Paul Cordone of Gloversville, New York won the biggest lottery jackpot in American history. The previous year, New Hampshire became the first state to legalize a state-operated lottery, selecting winners through a complicated system that involved two separate raffles and a horse race to ensure the results weren’t rigged. Like thousands of New Yorkers, Cordone had crossed state lines for a chance to buy a lottery ticket, and he returned  to New Hampshire in September to watch the results firsthand. After his designated horse came through, Cordone became one of six winners of the first legal lottery in the post-World War II period. His reward? $100,000. …