Gladiator Media: I’m Sure Watching People Kill Each Other Would Make for Great Television.

Watching some reactions to Stewart/Colbert rally on TV this morning before heading out – couldn’t get the notion out of my head: Most of those on TV who defended themselves against Stewart’s critique – media does not just feed off political conflict, but actively invents it in order to sell its products – basically said [...]

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Rally To End All Rallies

Although I’m not much for rallies and crowds, this one was enormous and really inspirational (if I can get serious for a moment or two). It’s now replaying on C-SPAN, but I can attest that the crowds were gigantic and very polite (click to enlarge):

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“Party Line Continentalists?” (and Post-Kantian Philosophy)

While my first instinct was to simply ignore Brian Leiter’s discussion of “Party Line Continental Philosophers,” since it appears to be nothing more than a straw man, I came across this rather thoughtful response at a blog called Speculative Humbug: Leiter suggests (or rather alludes to his having suggested elsewhere) that we are living in [...]

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Accountability Regimes and Academic Life

Great article by Gaye Tuchman in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, “The Future of Wannabe U,” in which she continues her analysis of the accountability regime that drives the academic life: Annually, other job and tenure candidates list how many articles and books they have published, how many talks they have delivered (including how many [...]

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Niqabitch: Anti-Burka Ban Protest

(h/t Carl Dyke) Telegraph article here  

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On Typical Symptoms of Academic Ressentiment

Another stranger reads something by Levi Bryant, discovers it’s mostly hypocritical shit: The first thing I should point out is that there is a less than constructive, and ultimately sort of false, humility in Levi’s post. He begins as follows: “I ordinarily don’t like to give advice on writing as I don’t believe I’ve attained [...]

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Zizek Does A Book Review

Actually a short and coherent piece on China’s Communist Party in LBR: Mao may be 30 per cent bad, but he continues to be celebrated as the founding father of the nation, his body in a mausoleum and his image on every banknote. In a clear case of fetishistic disavowal, everyone knows that Mao made [...]

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“Forty-Four Ways of Looking at Marginalia”

From the lastest Glossator: Practice and Theory of Commentary, I quite liked this article: “Forty-Four Ways of Looking at Marginalia.”   (44 Ways –pdf):

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“Peeing is Political”

So says Harvey Molotch in the introduction to a forthcoming volume of essays, Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with the editors: Q: What do public toilets tell us about ourselves? A; The public restroom, where private acts have to be taken care of in semi-public space, is [...]

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France on Strike

An extraordinary photo of high school students protesting the pension reforms in Paris from The Boston Globe’s  series of arresting images chronicling the protests across France (here).

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