Category
Essays
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Law, Written in Spray Paint
“Paying attention to the temporary markings etched onto the asphalt, we are afforded a glimpse into the otherwise hidden world that lies below the city’s surface.”
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The Protest Is Over—But Its Politics Remain
Ten years later, the Gezi Park protests continue to shape Turkish politics.
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Escape from Earth: Raquel Forner’s Space Paintings
If the iconic NASA astronaut is a confident (male) neo-colonist, Forner’s Astronauts are infantile, unprotected, vulnerable.
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The Low-Tech Side of Agri-Food Innovation
Is “low-tech” a more sustainable alternative to moving fast and breaking things? Or just a new iteration of the neoliberal fantasy?
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Literature: What to Make of Complicity?
Turkish literature shows how difficult it is to balance political critique with literary experimentation. But it can—and, perhaps, must—succeed.
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As Society Evolves, So Too Does the University
Faculty and students can—and must—govern their own institutions, so that universities maintain their vital power.
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Finding Your “Voice”: Author-Read Audiobooks
Does the author-read audiobook offer a perfect confluence between person, authorial persona, voice, and aesthetic form?
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Cracks in the Louvre Abu Dhabi
The museum has made its splash, but if it wants to be more than a work of starchitecture, it requires deeper collections and bolder curatorial vision.
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Death in Mexico Means Something Different Now
Mexico once cultivated a “special relationship” with death. But cultural globalization and rising violence is weakening that bond.
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Armenia: Another Century, Another Genocide?
From the start of Armenia’s independence in 1991, Turkey took a hostile position toward its erstwhile victim of genocide. That hostility remains.
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Armenia and Azerbaijan: That Other War
The radical simplifications that flow from nationalism shrink the possibilities to understand the other.
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Now the Humanities Can Disrupt “AI”
The world’s humanists might just be the new MVPs in the struggle for the future of critical thinking.
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Magnificent Wreck: Samuel Taylor Coleridge at 250
How to interpret Coleridge’s voluminous patchwork of triumphs, fragments, stolen snippets, and unrealized plans? Does any larger pattern emerge?
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“To Convey Love Through Sound”: A Jazz Musician’s Comeback in the Aftermath of a Hate Crime
“All I could do those days was stay in bed because my head was spinning from the painkillers.”
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Why Does Japanese Society Overlook Racism?
“The Japanese government’s official position denies the very existence of racial discrimination.”
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Data Free Disney
Each day, 50,000 people enter Disney’s theme parks, along with their phones, purchases, locations, and photos. What happens to the data?
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA and ASTR 2022
In this special mega edition of Shoptalk, guess which performative utterance was said at which conference.
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“We Plot to Undo the World”
Artist Simone Leigh curated a series of intellectual sermons directed by Black women who grieved, strategized, loved, and yearned for community.
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Jewish Havens: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
For centuries, the city’s Sephardim adhered to Jewish law within the community, but also had secular lives in the relatively lax Dutch state.
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Quizzical: Which Academic Organization Are You?
If your life was a conference, what would be its theme?
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Small Nations, Big Feelings
In the 1930s, Americans fell in love with Czechoslovakia and Spain; today, it’s Ukraine. What happens when one finds a “second mother country”?
