Politics
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Believing in Science
There’s an awesome Mother Jones article on how we intake our science like lawyers and how our reasoning is inextricably linked to our emotional centers. We’re used to scientific evidence and opinion-based beliefs competing or being on opposite sides of…
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Books For The Politically Alienated
The founding editor of Bookslut offers an eclectic selection of books that might help us confront our own deeply American sense of political alienation. One of them I especially want to read: Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday…
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Ishmael Reed On The “Jim Crow Media”
This last year Ishmael Reed published a book of satirical essays targeting the current American media: Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers. Despite being a MacArthur Fellow, a critically-acclaimed author of nine novels…
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The More Things Change…
In 1968, the year I was born, Ronald Reagan was considered too extreme to be the Republican nominee for the presidency. Richard Nixon was the nominee and served a term and a half before resigning under threat of impeachment. In…
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Love in the Time of Terror Babies
“My parents, with admirable foresight, had their first child while they were on fellowships in the United States. My mother was in public health, and my father in a library-science program. Having an American baby was, my mother once said,…
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #25: Chris Graham in Conversation in a Syrian Taxi
Mohaned works at a small hotel in Palmyra, a desert town in northeast Syria. On the side, he helps a friend pitch taxi rides to tourists. (Mohaned speaks Arabic and English; his friend speaks only Arabic.) The following is an…
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Sounds like a reasonable position
Reykjavik just elected a comedian to be its mayor. Jon Gnarr is the head of the Best Party, which took just over a third of the vote in the recent elections, which means they control 6 of the City Council’s…
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Foreign Until Proven Innocent
Joe Lieberman is introducing something he calls the Terrorist Expatriation Act–TEA Act for short, though the redundancy seems lost on them–which would make it possible for the State Department to strip the citizenship from anyone they determine is “involved with…
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Judith Butler At Guernica
“All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable. A life that is in some sense socially dead or already ‘lost’ cannot be grieved…
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Hate’s Ugly Revival
“Over the last decade Hispanic immigrants have become the main focus of American hate groups. According to Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, after September 11, 2001, the conservative media began discussing immigration as a national security issue,…
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Totalitarian Kitsch
“It is the official art of authoritarian governments, aimed at extending state control through propaganda. Totalitarian kitsch exists to glorify the state, foster a personality cult surrounding the dictator and celebrate ceaseless and irrevocable social and economic progress through images…
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Morning Coffee
A little political guerrilla satire to start off your Tuesday: the first corporate candidate. I don’t understand the sudden influx in vintage match boxes online, but I am in favor of it. The world’s first building with built-in wind turbines…