19 minutes ago, my phone lit up with a headline from the New York Times: Top Stories: President Trump’s reckless threats could set the nation “on the path to World War III,” said Senator Bob Corker, an influential Republican Headlines like this feel relatively common, a reminder that crisis upon crisis has become the status…
Is this the Matrix?: Reality in the era of bots
NPR’s Tom Ashbrook hosts a show called On Point, which covers a multitude of topics ranging from schooling to online dating to genetics to The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Available as a podcast, On Point featured a story on August 9th about bots, which I listened to in curiosity and dismay, and not as…
The radical unknowing of hope
I am reading Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, a postmodern text from the 1980s about the simulation of the real which has replaced our conceptions of reality. It largely works as a critique of the media as a means by which we “recognize” the reality of our world as consumers, a reality which is in fact…
Education and civil society: a mini-festo and a short reading list (for starters)
I’m starting, with several fellow graduate students at CUNY, a Working Group on Philanthropy and Civil Society. We come from the fields of sociology, political science, social welfare, and other disciplines which, we argue, do not speak to each other nearly enough and share learning and language around the core questions we must face as…
“Who are you?”: Art as disruptor, generator of public space
At a graduate student conference called Radical Democracy at The New School a couple of weeks ago, I attended a panel in which several students discussed art and artists who sought to disrupt the status quo about how information is shared and important social issues are discussed among the people of any society. Institutionalized processes of dissemination…
Resist the punditry
A friend of mine shared a video of an interview between Gad Saad and Michael Rechtenwald, a professor at NYU who evidently has been “castigated for daring to criticize safe spaces and related thought policing, postmodernism, literary Darwinism, secularism in science, and the relationship between science and religion.” I’m including the video link here (I’d suggest…
