December 2011
34 posts
What is Normal?
by Simon Critchley (via Adbusters)
We are living through a dramatic and ever-widening separation between normal state politics and power. Many citizens still believe that state politics has power. They believe that governments, elected through a parliamentary system, represent the interests of those who elect them and that governments have the power to create effective, progressive change. But...
The New School in Exile, Revisited →
by Rachel Singer (via n+1)
I arrived at the New School in the fall of 2008 to do a master’s degree in anthropology. Tuition was $23,000 per year—this did not include room or board—but the opportunity to be in a great intellectual community eased my anxiety about the cost. A little bit.
Tuition was high for a reason: the school, I soon learned, was on shaky financial footing. Founded in 1919...
The man who told A Christmas Story. →
On Christmas Eve, TBS will again present its annual 24-hour marathon of Bob Clark’s modern classic, A Christmas Story. Wrapping presents while watching Ralphie pine for a Red Riding BB gun has become a holiday tradition as beloved and durable as candy canes and eggnog. Yet the author and narrator of A Christmas Story, Jean Shepherd, had a deeper legacy of enchanting, subtly barbed...
“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave...”
– Anatole France
Mapping Violent Crime, Murder Rates with FBI Data →
The FBI today released its mid-year crime figures from large cities around the county, and the data are positive, NPR reports:
The number of violent crimes reported by 12,500 U.S. law enforcement agencies fell 6.4 percent in the first half of this year compared to the same time in 2010, the FBI reports.
Using the federal data, which covers Jan. to June of this year, I plotted the figures on...
Is the Death Penalty Unconstitutional?
“Excessive bail shall not be required,
nor excessive fines imposed,
nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
—Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution
In the acknowledgements to his forthcoming book, Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment (Northeastern University Press, January 2012), law professor John Bessler (B.A. ’88) likens the writing...
Death sentences, executions take ’historic drop,’... →
Erik S. Lesser / AFP - Getty Images file
A Georgia State Patrol trooper watches over demonstrators calling for Georgia state officials to halt the scheduled execution of Troy Davis on Sept. 21. The protests were unsuccessful.
By Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com
The number of death sentences imposed in the U.S. has taken an “historic drop” — about 75 percent — over the last 15 years,...
People Will Virtually Kill One Person To Save Five →
“It’s a moral and ethical problem that has been studied before: you see a train heading towards five hikers and you have the power to save them. Just pull a switch to make the train swerve out of the way on another track. BUT you’ll kill another hiker who won’t see the train coming at all. What do you do? Intervene? Or no?
Variations on this have vexed philosophers (and their students) for...
“Altered opinions do not alter a man’s character (or do so very little); but they...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
Anarchist Anthropology →
by Thomas Meaney (in the New York Times Book Review)
The anthropologist David Graeber has a strong claim to being the house theorist of Occupy Wall Street. A veteran of the antiglobalization uprisings in Seattle and Genoa, he helped orchestrate the first “General Assembly” in New York this summer, and has since become one of the movement’s most outspoken defenders. For him, the encampments in...
Death penalty dropped against Mumia Abu-Jamal →
By Kathy Matheson (via The Associated Press)
Prosecutors on Wednesday abandoned their 30-year pursuit of the execution of convicted police killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther whose claim that he was the victim of a racist legal system made him an international cause celebre.
Abu-Jamal, 58, will instead spend the rest of his life in prison. His writings and radio broadcasts from...
WatchTennis: ’Deep in the Woods’
Trial of the Will →
By Christopher Hitchens (via Vanity Fair)
Death has this much to be said for it: You don’t have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free. —Kingsley Amis
Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn Suicide remarks are torn From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn Plays wasted words, proves to warn That he not busy being born is busy dying. —Bob Dylan,...
Watchbrianclement:
Andrew Bird’s new album Break it Yourself will be released internationally on 5 March and in the United States on 6 March 2012.
youmightfindyourself:
A Victim Treats His Mugger...
The Psychology of Nakedness →
by Jonah Lehrer (via Wired)
The human mind sees minds everywhere. Show us a collection of bouncing balls and we hallucinate agency; a glance at a stuffed animal and we endow it with a mood; I’m convinced Siri doesn’t like me. The point is that we are constantly translating our visual perceptions into a theory of mind, as we attempt to imagine the internal states of teddy bears, microchips and...
The End of the Consumerist Model →
by Bernard Stiegler (via Adbusters)
Photo credit: Nick Whalen
I am writing these reflections in the midst of economic and political debates taking place throughout the world about the necessity of implementing stimulus plans to limit the destructive effects of the First planetary economic crisis of the capitalist world.
Now when, in such debates, “investment stimulus” and “consumption...
