BY NAOMI MORGENSTERNAssociate professor of English at the University of Toronto From a podium in Central Park West, a student activist from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School declared: “The adults failed us and now seventeen people are dead.” During a day of nationwide actions, a coalition of youth would point to the “failure” of adults … More The Child at the Social Limit
BY SHEILA WATT-CLOUTIER The world has come to know the wildlife of the Arctic more than its people: The Inuit. For two decades my life’s work, which includes elected positions with an international mandate to protect the rights and interests of our people of the circumpolar world, has been to work diligently to put a … More Earth Day 2018: Facing the greatest human-rights challenge of our time.
BY JOANNA ZYLINSKA The apocalypse is back—with a vengeance! Cue the visually intriguing Altered Carbon on Netflix, the conceptually teasing yet disappointingly humanist Humans on Channel 4 in the UK, and the just plain terrible Blade Runner 2049 (surely a crime against cinema, if not against humanity). But let me make what might seem like … More The End of Man, One More Time.
BY SUSAN BARTLETT FOOTEProfessor emerita in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota In the past two years, the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement have given voice to demands for gender equality. These claims are part of a long history—from suffragists marching for the vote to the cry of feminists in … More Uncovering the brave women behind mental-health reform in Minnesota.
BY AMANDA HURONAssistant professor of interdisciplinary social sciences at the University of the District of Columbia On Christmas Eve 1977, the working-class residents of an apartment complex in Washington, D.C., all received eviction notices. They had 90 days to get out; the owner of the complex wanted to rip it down and replace it with … More Carving out the Commons: Fighting Displacement in the Capitalist City
CHRISTOPHER A. PAULAssociate Professor, Seattle University The core argument in my book is that video games are an actualized meritocracy, a realm in which the values of hard work and skill have been pushed to their extremes and the result is a toxic community that focuses more on the celebration of individual glory than on … More On gaming, athletes, and individual glory . . . oh, Mercy!
BY JANET HALLEY, PRABHA KOTISWARAN, RACHEL REBOUCHÉ, AND HILA SHAMIR As we celebrate International Women’s Day, it is hard not to be struck by how ubiquitous the political message of feminism is. Until recently, announcing one’s feminist credentials elicited looks of surprise, incomprehension, or outright hostility. Fast forward to 2018 and Sweden has a foreign … More International Women’s Day 2018: On feminism’s political message and its past, present, and future.
BY LUKA ARSENJUKUniversity of Maryland, College Park “It certainly seems that all art forms in their extreme manifestations, i.e. where they attempt to expand the limits of their potential and their material, invariably end up by trying to appropriate the rudiments of the art of the future: the art of cinema.” In Sergei Eisenstein’s conception, … More Sergei Eisenstein and the Ecstasies of the Book.
Image: Jenny Anger, First German Autumn Salon Reconstruction Project. BY JENNY ANGERProfessor of art history, Grinnell College A trio of international exhibitions defined the parameters of modern art ca. 1912-13: the Sonderbund (Cologne 1912), the Armory Show (New York 1913), and the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon, Berlin 1913). The Armory Show is … More A lesson in managing uncertainty: digitizing the First German Autumn Salon
BY JAMES P. LENFESTEYExcerpts from the introduction to If Bees Are Few It is said there are twenty thousand species of bees in the world, a genus fifty million years old, but in the fertile imagination of the world’s poets, there is no beginning and no end to bee buzz. As Rilke wrote, poets are … More Let’s hear it for the bee.
