Tag: Ethics

Franzen Makes Nice

Reading Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, in a state at once sympathetic and skeptical, I kept thinking of George Kaplan. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest, a ring of foreign ...

Why Critics Wait

As protests over the death of Freddie Gray intensified, Sydette Harry tweeted about yet another dimension of widespread institutional anti-black racism in the United States. She wrote, “It’s funny ...

China at World’s End

In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of ...

Stunt Double: Twice Fallen

The wounds of civil wars last. You can forgive a stranger, but family and neighbors, that’s another story. In America, the Confederate flag still raises old myths and divisions. In Algeria, the ...

The Algebra of Justice

The Underground Railroad is among the most celebrated instances of civil disobedience in US history. But, though famous and beloved, it’s cloaked in mystery. As an extralegal, clandestine operation ...

On Longer Lives and Longer Deaths

America has many open secrets. The nursing home is one of them. We try not to think too hard or too long about its residents or its low-wage staff. We’ll confront its smell, its humiliations, its bleakness, only once we need it ...

Drone Poems

The protests of Hong Kong’s 2014 “Umbrella Revolution” were marked in early days by the intermittent appearance of a helicopter drone flying high above the crowds, looking rather like a pizza box ...

Soft Atheism

It’s not easy being new. It doesn’t last long. Sometimes it isn’t even an apt characterization in the first place. Take “New Atheism,” the label applied to a body of writings by such figures as ...

The Other Side of the Looking Glass

The absent original—a lost “authentic” text, accessible only through its corrupted traces—occupies a central place in the postmodern imagination. Often at the very core of novels, the image of an ...

A Head of His Time

Recently longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, John Corey Whaley’s eagerly awaited second novel, Noggin, promises second chances: life after death. Or not death ...

Can Drones Have Ethics?

In this interview, Claire Richard and media studies professor Peter Asaro discuss the history of drone warfare and the troubling proliferation of new technologies that can surveil and kill from a ...