It used to be that you could get somewhere by saying things like “To take your point of view to its logical conclusion, you'd be endorsing extermination camps,” or compulsory sterilization, or euthanasia, or the Thought Police, or whatever horror it seems every reasonable person would want to exclude. But that move doesn't work any more. Now there are Republicans who come out and say what they think in their heart of hearts. There...

We suffer in this country from a fear of what right-wing rabble-rousers with no practical experience, no education, and no obligation to tell the truth may say. Yesterday, Team Smear scored another takedown. A man who has done a tremendous job, from what I've read, creating jobs and improving the urban environment while reducing the waste of energy from dilapidated buildings, has just left his position as special advisor to the White House aft...

Father Gérard Jean-Juste died last week. He'd been sick for years-- diagnosed with leukemia while in jail in 2005-- but nobody would think of him as weakened. Arrested again and again in Haiti and the US for doing what he felt called to do (feeding the hungry, preaching redistributive justice, demonstrating for Aristide), he never learned his lesson, never left well enough alone, never concluded that it was somebody else's turn to save the wor...

There is a memorable scene in the film Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976), in which Logan 5 (Michael York), in his jovial state of idleness, teleports a series of potential female partners from the community-run circuit (meat market). When a woman of his fancy is finally beamed into his apartment (whose name is revealed later on in the film as Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter)), Logan welcomes her with open arms, “Let’s have sex!”

Philosophy 101 always includes a discussion of the appearance/reality distinction fairly early on—the world/self/mind as it appears may not be the world/self/mind as it is. The really juicy philosophical problems all seem to have this distinction at their core, and you can go pretty far in intro phil by paying attention to seemings.* So maybe I’m primed to notice. But I’ve grown increasingly concerned about how that distinction gets conflate...

Everyone’s excited about the new president, but I’m hoping that his presidency will turn out to be boring, at least most of the time. I don’t just mean that life gets “interesting” when things start going wrong, but that most of what good governance involves isn’t what most people would consider exciting. Especially now, it seems to me, what we most need to work on as a country includes a lot of projects that lack wow: energy reform, healthcar...

In a thoughtful, somewhat agonized article in The American Scholar (Summer 2008), Charles Johnson offered the view that the classic African-American experience narrative—slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, civil rights, Dr. King, unrest, Black Panthers, painful rises and frustrated struggles—doesn’t correspond in its totality with the histories that many self-designated black people living in America today carry with them. Black immigrants from v...

My daughter's preschool class cast their votes for president the same Tuesday that everyone else did. I'm not sure when her teachers called it for the Democrat, but the outcome was the same as the official one only more so: Obama 13; McCain 4. I wasn't all that surprised by the result (her school is in lower Manhattan, after all). But I was struck by how tenacious the moment was for her. She'll happily tell you who she voted for and who ...

For some, the recent election of Barack Obama is a victory against racism in America. To me, it shows the opposite just as well: that a black man must be ten times better to have an equal shot. He must be handsome, eloquent and Vulcan cool, at once intellectual and inspirational, and lastly a brilliant strategist who makes few mistakes and recovers from them almost immediately. He must be all of these things in order to defeat his white ri...

In view of the historic inauguration on Tuesday, January 20, we here at printculture will be posting all week on all things Obama. Join in on the conversation in the comments section. To kick things off, I have just a couple of quick thoughts:

In a Spanish university town the other night, I went down a side street and wound up in the middle of a protest march against Israel’s attacks on Gaza. There were students, grizzled militants, moms (some in purdah) pushing strollers, and a lot of banners with slogans. But what caught my attention were the shoes held aloft on sticks (in one case, on a crutch): shoes, now the international symbol of contempt for American-abetted greed, vengefuln...

Unlike some of the other members of the printculture gang I’m not much of a cyclist. I didn’t even learn to ride until I was ten, and harbor a deep suspicion of the idea of remaining stable on two wheels. I avoid letting go of the handlebars as much as possible; you won’t find me doing any fancy dismounts off my bike.

The rejection of the bailout deal probably has the same roots as the attack on “elites.” It's sheer vengefulness, as if the alternative between bailing out Wall Street and bailing out Main Street were a real choice or a moral verdict. Although there was a lot to dislike in the initial bailout plan (power without accountability being the main sticking point in my view), shooting oneself in the foot out of anger at the behavior of th...

My baby is the clear choice for president this November. My baby won't use a lot of big words to try to confuse you. He doesn't know any words yet. But he has a good heart. My baby won't cut and run in Iraq. He can't even crawl yet. You'll know where my baby stands on any given issue: wherever I left him, because, as previously mentioned, he can't crawl away . . .

Speaking of twittering and flocks... if I had been one of those early adopter twitterers you might have noticed that I spent a lot of time reading election coverage over the past few weeks. But it was, like twittering itself, a completely visual intake of information, via NYT, Salon, Slate, the Washington Post, and a few random others (in other words, The Liberal Media). I’ve been living abroad for over five years now and I’m getting to know t...

Sorry to nag, but better safe than sorry. In the state where I live, and (I hope) the state where you live, if you're a US citizen, there's still plenty of time to register to vote. But do it soon. Many of the people who read this blog are academics, and academics move around a lot, worrying more about whether their e-mail address is current than whether their license matches their actual address. I know; I just realized I was out of line! So ...

Adding to the noise machine: 1. Kerry's speech was the best I've seen him give. What is it with these guys (Kerry, Gore) who become dramatic, compelling speakers only after they've lost a major election? Is it that I see them differently, that somehow their tragic history gives their language a depth and resonance it wouldn't otherwise have? Or is it that they finally realize that they have nothing to lose by telling the truth — that the...

The Beijing Olympics has been a media and publicity success thus far; but what is missing from this picture of global harmony?

Daniel Gordon’s A State of Mind (2004) takes viewers inside North Korea through portraits of two young girls, Hyon Sun and Song Yon, as they train for the national Mass Games. All the publicity for and reviews of the film speak of the unprecedented access Gordon was given, enabled by the success of his previous film, The Game of Their Lives (2002), about the North Korean team that made it to the 1966 World Cup quarterfinals.

OK, so I was listening to a friend today who was concerned that people had invested “messianic” hopes in Obama. Hopes that he would solve all our problems and leave us something extra under the tree at Christmas. To my mind the difference between the Obamacious candidate and the Bush II knock-off is extreme, maybe even world-historical or sublime in proportion, but if we have to worry about something, let it be about whether he can...

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”[1] Thus, in 1775, before the founding of the Republic and even before its unilateral declaration of independence, Dr. Samuel Johnson pinched a nerve of American identity—perhaps the nerve of American identity. It is certainly my nerve.

Last week, Printculture commenter Babykong, searching for reasons to turn away from the blinding light of my summary of Watership Down, whose photon-drenched penumbra had laid bare the furthest reaches of his conscience, requested that the blog give him material that would be a little easier on his soul: something, for gods' sake, on the current election. Well, here it is.

A rare victory for the forces of good over the last two weeks: faced with the refusal of South African cargo unions to unload a shipload of weapons destined for Zimbabwe, the People's Republic of China has (apparently) decided to bring the ship back home. The heroism of the dock workers and their union, the South African Transport Workers Union, is a stirring reminder of the possibilities of nonviolent resistance to evil.

I was talking the other day with a scholar whose work changed the face of American feminism in the 1980s, and who was part, more generally, of the wave of feminist theory and criticism that swept through the academy, the courts, and society in general in that era. “What ever happened to feminism?” I asked her. I meant the question, though of course at some level I know very well what happened to it: much of its energy went into gen...

On my way home from a conference in New Orleans last weekend, I noticed the following sign posted near the security checkpoint conveyor belt: Security is no laughing matter. All comments will be taken seriously.