February 2012

Hip hop is a fundamentally subversive genre. It has become a universal medium of social and political expression for young, dissident, and marginalized people everywhere. What Arabic hip hop has given the Arab world is a widely-accessible and unfiltered medium for disseminating revolutionary ideas.

From London Review of Books: Empirical study led L. Ron Hubbard to the principles on which Scientology is based. He never claimed to have had a revelation. He spelled the principles out in 1950 in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the bestselling self-help treatise in which he...

Shirin, Abbas Kiarostami, 2008 by Cain Todd Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays, by C. Mole, D. Smithies, W. Wu (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 Are you paying attention to this? William James, the oft-called father of modern psychology, famously said that everyone knows what attention is, so if...

If Borges continually returned to his first book of poetry, endlessly tinkering with it and republishing it in slightly different form so that it would truly prefigure "everything that he would do afterwards" (Obras completas 33), his approach to his first book of prose was quite different.

Factory workers in Shenzhen, China. Photograph by Douglas Johnson From New Left Review: Marx blamed California—the Gold Rush and its resultant monetary stimulus to world trade—for prematurely ending the revolutionary cycle of the 1840s. In the immediate aftermath of 2008, so-called brics became the new California. Airship Wall Street...

From The Paris Review: Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually-defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth-century who coined the word “pornography.” So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most...

We are living through ominous times. In the wake of the 2008 subprime crisis, the world economy has been battered by a series of profound shocks that have not been experienced since the 1930s.

Tahrir Square, Cairo. Photography by Ramy Raoof From The Guardian: Is there much value in describing again the demonstrations, encampments and activist movements already covered, seemingly exhaustively, by the traditional and new media over the last two years? The quality of Mason’s observation and storytelling quickly dispels any such...

Bryan Cranston as Walter White, Breaking Bad, AMC by William Egginton In a recent NPR piece TV critic Eric Deggans cites shows like “Hell on Wheels,” Sons of Anarchy,” “Dexter,” and “Breaking Bad” as evidence of a proliferations of television programs featuring “characters the audience likes and wants to...

Most evolutionary biologists tell us that natural selection is much better at improving trees than forests. This is especially true when the interests of individuals conflict with those of the community as a whole. A more diverse forest might be less susceptible to disease outbreaks, but that won't stop...