Years ago I heard a talk on the history of film criticism that made some version of the following claim: key elements of feminist film criticism had faded from prominence not because subsequent arguments had improved upon or undone them, but rather because people had gotten bored of seeing and making the same arguments. It wasn’t quite that simple – but the clarity of that general proposition, the recession of intellectual ideas by virtue of...

A false start today, on the way to whatever this post is or isn’t. The false start: a “review” of the Windows Vista operating system, in which I reveal something deep about the user it constructs. Stalled, after no blood could be coaxed from the stone that is my observation of the fact that “My Computer” is now simply “Computer.” “My Documents” are now simply “Documents.” So, my review of Windows Vista reveals only something we already kne...

Leading up to the 2004 presidential election, I hoped Kerry would win for a variety of reasons. There were practical changes I expected his administration would make, policies that I expected to agree with more than those offered by Bush. I hoped that the country would repudiate Bush’s war in Iraq by voting him out. More generally, though, I really believed that it would do everyone some good to have their emotional and identificatory ties ...

1. Tenure. Pros: Protects academic freedom Creates job security Cons: Allows people to get away with doing no work or bad teaching So the problem is, how do you resolve the con without getting rid of the pros?

There have been a couple of interesting stories about photographs from Iraq lately. The most recent is the story about the mislabeled photograph on Howard Kaloogian’s website. Kaloogian is running for the Congressional seat vacated by the corrupt and recently imprisoned Randy “Duke” Cunningham of California. On the candidate’s website an image of a bustling city square from a July 2005 trip to Baghdad served as evidence of Kaloogian’s argum...

That people’s desires shape their understanding of the world is a pretty basic idea. While there’s some debate as to where that leaves truth unsullied by desire – a debate affected, of course, by participants’ suspicion of what they take to be each others’ desired outcomes – it’s hard to imagine insisting that no one ever sees what they want to see.

The dawn of the era of human rights in the West corresponds almost exactly with the dawn of the era of criticizing other people for not respecting human rights. It also corresponds, rather sadly, with the era of saying that certain people can't be granted human rights because they're too uncivilized. For instance: in the early 1800s most European countries were outlawing torture (the first really popular criticisms of torture appear in the mi...

Part of what makes Battlestar Galactica such an interesting show has to do with the way it invokes and works through the contemporary American political situation. The human race, under attack from a terroristic threat of robots that appear human, finds itself in a situation in which the difference between friend and foe becomes impossible to articulate. The war situation produces--as it has these days, and perhaps as it must inevitably--a gre...

Collected statements by President Bush on Iraq:   Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.   We will work to give our intelligence professionals the tools they need. Our collection and analysis of intelligence will never be perfect, but in an age where our margin for...

"We got a strategy, and it's a clear strategy. On the one hand, we will hunt down these killers and terrorists and bring them to justice, and train the Iraqi forces to join us in that effort. The second part of the strategy is a political strategy, based upon the knowledge that you defeat a backward, dark philosophy with one that's hopeful. And that hopeful philosophy is one based upon universal freedom." One the one hand, this is another co...

American soldiers in Iraq have been purchasing the right to see pornographic photographs at a website titled nowthatsfuckedup.com in exchange for posting photographs of dead Iraqis complete with morally stupid captions ("What every haji should look like," etc). Here is a description of the photographs written by Chris Thompson for the East Bay Express: At Wilson's Web site, you can see an Arab man's face sliced off and placed in a bowl fille...

Last week, I left for my long-awaited vacation and the journey was a minor disaster. The first leg of my transcontinental flight was delayed by almost two hours, such that I was worried about missing my connecting flight in Chicago. When I got to O’Hare with about 40 minutes to spare, I thought with relief that the hard part was over. After almost 3 hours of waiting, they let the passengers off the plane so we could stretch our legs. ...

The other day I saw someone wearing a shirt that said, "I hate Michigan so much, I'd root for France to beat them." Ahh, France. Where would American nationalism be without you? The left-wing blogs have been full of criticism of various Fox News types for measuring possible benefits of the London bombings. But Brit Hume and his buddies would be surprised, I think, to find an ally in Pierre Assouline, who blogs about literature for Le Monde. I'...

When a dingo eats a baby, everyone is surprised. The phrase uttered, apparently, by Linda Chamberlain at Ayers Rock in 1980 and immortalized by Meryl Streep in the 1988 film A Cry in the Dark, was "the dingo took my baby." Chamberlain, who was cleared of the murder (initial inquest: death by dingo), was later convicted of it, then eventually cleared (here's a full account of the incident and its aftermath). But it was as "the dingo ate my baby...

A month ago Fernando Botero released a number of paintings and sketches showing torture in the Abu Ghraib prison. Their style is immediately recognizable. Since the beginning of his career Botero has been known for the corpulent bodies his subjects. click to enlarge ...and his still lives evince the same commitment to something like obesity; the coffee pot in Still Life with Watermelon (1992) has had more than its share of half and half: ...

I was thinking today about how you would go about making an interesting video game out of the current geopolitical situation. A useful game might start immediately after the "successful" U.S. invasion of Iraq, right before the end of the war. I imagine a player being given, at that moment, the choice of a few different sides: U.S., Kurdish, Shiite, or Sunni. The game would run through an established time frame, and presumably would involve org...

Today I realized that I spend a lot of time avoiding political things that I know will make me upset. I can't listen to or look at the president, for instance, or most of the Cabinet, without feeling a combination of fury and despair, which means I can't (and don't) watch the news on TV or listen to NPR. I get most of my news from the web and from newspapers, where I can more or less control what information I receive. Presumably this makes m...

When the history of our era is written a few hundred years from now, I hope that one of the signature ideologemes of the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries will turn out to have been the movement from national energy organized around "wars against" to a political and nation-state system structurally dependent on a series of "wars on." (I hope so at least partly because someone checking the Printculture archives in 2305 will then rea...

From an AP story on a book manuscript being written by Sgt. Erik R. Saar, who worked as an Arabic translator at the US camp in Guantanamo Bay. Saar's book will report that female "civilian contractors" were used to sexually molest detainees, including one case in which a female interrogator rubbed her breasts on a detainee's back. Muslim men, the AP adds, consider it taboo to have close contact with women who aren't their wives. Here's Saar: I...

If you're one of our few readers, you'll know that most of us don't think much of the current administration, particularly when it comes to its conduct of the war in Iraq. Others have expressed the rationale for denying our president the right to choose his own cabinet member in the case of Alberto Gonzales at length; we simply wish here to add our names to the list of those who agree with the rationale and the position it expresses.

The Poor Man, which became one of my favorite blogs a few weeks ago for using the phrase "we can't unshit the bed" with reference to Iraq, quoted Jonathan Edelstein last week as saying that the US should get out Iraq while it's still capable of making a "moral" decision in that regard. The idea that there would be anything "moral" left for the US to do in Iraq is, for someone who (strange though it may seem) loves the idea of this country as m...

Testimony at the trial of Abu Ghraib torturer Charles Graner and other news reports show that Iraqi detainees were subject to forced group masturbation, anal rape, and involuntary enemas. One detainee was forced to eat out of a toilet. So you want to ask: What the fuck is up with these people and their endless obsession with asses? Honestly. But to ask that question is already to have slipped past the genuine outrage here, which has nothing t...