Across the slatted border between the United States and Mexico, near Ciudad Juárez, the artists Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello recently installed several ...
Tag: Social Theory
Whose Life?
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by the philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale, is a book anyone committed to public-facing scholarship ought to take note of. This is all the ...
Virtual Roundtable on “The Mana of Mass Society”
Many of anthropology’s terms of art are taken from afar. Especially in the half century after 1870 ...
The Mortal Marx
In the mid-1860s, as an anxious and ailing Karl Marx worked on the 30-page essay that would billow into Das Kapital, his daughter Eleanor—“Tussy”—would play under his desk. With her dolls, kittens ...
“The Passing of the Great Race” @100
2016 marks a century since the publication of The Passing of the Great Race, a book described by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould as “the most influential tract of American scientific racism ...
How to Write about Videogames
I remember his blue-plastic hair, drawn back in a little bun that looked octagonal. I remember the pointy hat that crowned him in the eyes of other players: “Sorcerer’s petasos +1,” the “+1” ...
Siri, Why Am I So Busy?: An Interview with Judy Wajcman
Smart technologies—phones, tablets, wearables, and time-saving apps—are supposed to lighten our load. So why are we always complaining about overwork? Judy Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School ...
#Normporn
In the penultimate season of 30 Rock (2006–13), the sitcom’s resident kinkmeisters and genderqueer lovers, Jenna and Paul, are faced with a profound sexual crisis: after chatting about their day ...
Can There Be a Feminist World?
The following is the lightly edited text of a lecture delivered on November 16, 2013, at the Columbia University Global Center in Amman, Jordan. I am pleased to be here at the Columbia Global Center ...
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 ...
Reading Social Democracy in Translation
It wasn’t so long ago that Scandinavia seemed very far away from London and New York. But steady doses of Dogme films and Ikea furniture over the last decades have prepared the way for a swell in the ...
Ordinary Lives
“Nobody’s listening!” (“Le pays, en un mot, ne se sent pas représenté,” or literally, “The country, in a word, feels that it is not listened to.”) Pierre Rosanvallon, a professor of history at the ...
Melville and American Power: A Conversation with Greg Grandin, Chris Hedges, and Christian Parenti
Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World explores the extraordinary 1805 slave ship uprising that inspired Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. In last ...
Changes
The first thing that happens, when a literary historian starts using computers to think about literature, is that the object of study changes. Not just the tool; the object itself. “The objects ...
Cancer’s Poison Gift
S. Lochlann Jain’s Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us is both a memoir of the author’s personal journey as a cancer patient and a trenchant analysis of why preventing cancer has never been an American ...
Talcott Parsons’s Favorite Student: An Interview with Robert N. Bellah
The recent death of Robert N. Bellah signaled the passing of an era. An acclaimed sociologist of religion and a scholar of Japan, Bellah achieved his reputation in both of these fields, but spoke ...
Hopelessly Devoted: Why We Watch Sports
My father called me the other day to ask if I was in a good mood. The Mets were in first place, having triumphed in their season opener. These days Mets fan cherish even the briefest of moments on ...
The Anti-Revolutionary Science
Speaking to Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in New York City last October, the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs placed himself squarely on their side, saying, “You are doing a ...
Sugrue and Venkatesh on Robert J. Sampson’s “Great American City”
Though published only a few months ago, it’s already clear that Robert J. Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect will rank among the most important works of urban ...
The Politics of Sacred Life
Humanitarianism, according to Didier Fassin, is “a relatively recent invention” that has become “a potent force of our world” that is “global and yet uneven.” It has come, he asserts, to occupy “a ...