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

Docking the Long Tail of Culture

How mass culture has scored a decisive victory in the age of the Internet

In the past, the difficulty of acquiring long-tail content suggested that a person had many underlying status assets, such as intelligence, curiosity, and deep knowledge. When anyone can find anything obscure on the Internet within minutes, acquisition alone reveals no virtues or skills....

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Docking the Long Tail of Culture

Three Ways the United States Should Rethink the Economics of Higher Education

Now working in education in Australia, there’s something former New School Provost Tim Marshall doesn’t miss about the U.S. system

While tuition fees in Australia remain modest in comparison to the US, the design of the repayment scheme is also worth consideration. This scheme is available to students attending both government, and the growing number of accredited private, institutions. Unlike the US, where private lenders and servicers play an important ...
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Three Ways the United States Should Rethink the Economics of Higher Education

The “Transferable” Subsidy Scam

Meet a big, under-the-radar problem

It’s a mess, is what I’m saying. But making a corporate subsidy transferable is an easy thing to do under the radar, without folks knowing what it means or realizing what their state is in for when such a policy is actually implemented. ...

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The “Transferable” Subsidy Scam

Our Bodies, Ourselves, Online

Historian and activist Saniya Lee Ghanoui explains how a feminist classic entered the twenty-first century

When we started, we knew we needed experts from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Women and gender-expansive people from different races brought their own perspectives, personal and expert, and that would help us address racial health disparities. ...

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Our Bodies, Ourselves, Online

Might the U.S. Military Support Nuclear Disarmament?

Its senior leadership is uniquely positioned in the present moment to pursue a revolutionary possibility

It is often difficult in the moment to recognize when one is at a crossroads. In the 1991 Gulf War, I was a lowly tactical intelligence officer in a parachute infantry regiment of the 82nd Airborne, rolling through the Iraqi desert beneath an air campaign that left smoldering charcoal where ...
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Might the U.S. Military Support Nuclear Disarmament?

“God Is Dead”

And other memories of coming of age gay and Catholic in the sixties

I was flabbergasted. The idea that someone not only didn’t believe in God but also had grown up without God was something I couldn’t take in. All I could think was, “Wow. Without God, he’d never have to worry about whether he was going to hell, whether he’d make it ...
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“God Is Dead”