May 2011

 Capture Grivitskogo redoubt at Plevna, Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky, 1885 by James Warner Dostoevsky was in favor of military intervention in the Balkans, Tolstoy opposed to it. The arguments they put forward are surprisingly relevant to our own current wars. A little background – in the summer of 1875, Orthodox Christians...

In Fukushima's Wake | by Alexander Cockburn

New Left Review 

The reactions to Fukushima from the nuclear industry’s shills have been predictable—if still scarcely believable—sallies into cognitive dissonance. Thus Paddy Reagan, professor of Nuclear Physics at the University of Surrey: ‘We had...

Migrants arriving by boat on Lampedusa Island, Noborder network by Tito Boeri Lampedusa is a beautiful island closer to North Africa than to Sicily. In the last two months it has been flooded with migrants, mostly coming from Tunisia. The preliminary count is 28,000 arrivals on an island where...

Round structures, Site PVN306, Naco Valley by Edward M. Schortman and Patricia A. Urban A debate that has long fascinated us concerns the ways in which political relations emerge from, and are sustained by, daily interactions among individuals of all ranks. The traditional approach in our discipline, archaeology, has tended to...

From A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket, illustrated by Brett Helquist From Los Angeles Review of Books: In Germany, there are pretty much only two categories: literature—work aspiring toward literary merit—and then just pure information, train schedules and the like. (Unfortunate example.) John Cheever’s “legacy” is based...

Illustration by Milo Winter, from Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, 1930 edition  From American Scientist: To follow global energy affairs is to have a never-ending encounter with new infatuations. Fifty years ago media ignored crude oil (a barrel went for little more than a dollar). Instead the western utilities were preoccupied...

Fantasia, Walt Disney Productions, 1940  by Bill Benzon Early in my career I was immersed in the ideas of a handful of Continental thinkers, including Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Piaget, and Lévi-Strauss, but, as I explained in an essay, about my encounter with Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, that poem forced me away...

James Madison, Corporations, and the National Security State | by Scott Horton

Harpers

James Madison stood between 5'3" and 5'4" tall and weighed barely more than one hundred pounds. He was the most diminutive of the American presidents. He had no skills...

In fall 1941, a few months after Nazi Germany dismembered Yugoslavia and established a satellite called the Independent State of Croatia, local police in Sarajevo, a major city in the new state, hunted down a Jewish man who had been deported to a concentration camp.

Coca Plantation, Madre de Dios, Peru, Benedicte Desrus  by Elaine Carey Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, by Paul Gootenberg, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 442 pp. As someone who also has become interested in the scholarly analysis of the commodity flows of miracle powders, tinctures, and...