After having established the “determinate functioning” and systematic appearance of the Cecafumo cityscape shot in relation to the narrative of Mamma Roma – “The shot is inserted each time Mamma Roma or Ettore begins or concludes a line of action meant to improve his or her social position” (116) – Rhodes now argues the opposite, [...]
The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations by Daniel Heller-Roazen 295 pp. | 6 x 9 Available November 2009 FORTHCOMING from Zone Books: The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. Before humanitarian organizations, human rights, and the establishment of international law in the early modern period, the Roman statesmen already made [...]
As the latest instance of a major media outlet prescribing mass surrender of even the most limited workplace rights, the cover copy for the May 25, 2009 issue of TIME Magazine reads: “Throw away the briefcase: you’re not going to the office. You can kiss your benefits goodbye too. And your new boss won’t look [...]
In a CNN article on “How to keep your job” Tyler Cowen (of Marginal Revolution fame) recommends that you approach your boss and preemptively volunteer yourself for a wage cut. So, even as money keeps flowing to the top, mass media outlets are now recommending that workers volunteer themselves for further wage cuts, all under the name [...]
It’s a common accusation of the left that politics, liberal and conservative alike, becomes “aestheticized” through persistent suspensions of law and declarations of emergencies. But what, exactly, Neil Levi asks, in a timely, subtle paper on Carl Schmitt, is so “aesthetic” about political decisionism, a doctrine still fresh on our lips in the Obama era. [...]
There are, it would seem, two kinds of novelty: the one that breaks from tradition, ushering in a new order, and the one that perpetuates the same under the guise of change. The latter, associated with fads and trends, marks the logic of consumption, whereas the former, querying the new and indeterminate, suggests a revolutionary [...]
Greg Mankiw, the well-known Harvard economist, mentioned in passing in a post today that as a freshman at Princeton more than thirty years ago he had the good fortune of taking an introductory philosophy course taught by Richard Rorty. The lessons learned have stuck with him. In a post honoring Rorty’s recent death, Mankiw recounted [...]
It’s not too often that you see a Baudrillard-influenced paper published in a legal journal, but perhaps our time calls for it. Money, no doubt, has never seemed so abstract, imaginary, and, yet, hard to come by. The abstract to John J. Chung’s timely “Money as Simulacrum: The Legal Nature and Reality of Money” explains: [...]
In a post on Robert Fisk’s recent talk on Obama, Palestine, and the Middle East, Maximilian Forte picks-up on the widening gap between the neo-luddite old guard left and the emerging tech-savvy leftist blogger-journalist. I’ve always been a fan of Fisk — he’s one of only a few able to describe the Palestine-Israel conflict accurately [...]
David Swensen and Michael Schmidt make the case for turning newspapers into non-profits funded by a university-styled endowment. But is it necessary to characterize print news as what’s saving us from the dirty internet, that “‘cesspool’ of false information”? The New York Times is, after all, by all international standards one of the least credible [...]
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