Berfrois

August 2015

  • An Accidental Archivist

    August 2015 Highlights

    An Accidental Archivist

    Naming is powerful. A name can be a gift or a burden. Choosing or discarding a name can make you feel free. A nickname can make you feel loved or crushed.

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Everyday events could make nuclear war seem imminent…

Everyday events could make nuclear war seem imminent…

My mother doesn’t remember Pearl Harbor. But she was there. Barely two months old, she spent the raid held tightly by her mother in an improvised bomb shelter, where the two of them had joined some Honolulu neighbors.

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Kohle

Kohle

Germany is Europe's largest economy, and its wealth depends heavily on exporting industrial goods made with cheap electricity. Lignite is the cheapest source of electricity from fossil fuels, and Germany has the world's largest reserves of it.

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ZFC

How to Avoid Deficit Fetishism

How to Avoid Deficit Fetishism

When it comes to fiscal policy the politics of the right at the moment could be reasonably described as deficit fetishism. The policy of the centre left in Europe could also with some justification be described as growing appeasement towards deficit fetishism.

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‘It is the head of human poetry’

‘It is the head of human poetry’

In the used bookstores of Boston in the late 1980s, the Renaissance section always had multiple cheap copies of two books: E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance.

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Why should the past be charming?

Why should the past be charming?

My Yorkshire friend was saying that she hated being in an old house. There seemed to be other people in it besides the living.

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General Theory of Corbynomics

General Theory of Corbynomics

I noted a report in The Independent yesterday about comments that the shadow chancellor, Chris Leslie, had made about what he called Corbynomics. These are, I presume, the policies announced by Jeremy Corbyn nearly two weeks ago.

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The Bourgeois Kant

The Bourgeois Kant

For Wayne, a more authentic anti-bourgeois understanding of Kant will emerge once we place aesthetic experience back at the heart of the critical project, allowing us to reframe broader political issues of freedom, community, reification and the spectacle.

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Slugs’ Not Slug’s

Slugs’ Not Slug’s

Tell me about Slug’s, that much-loved and famously dangerous place on East 3rd Street between Avenues B and C.

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Revolutionary Citizenship

Revolutionary Citizenship

Let me begin with a hypothesis, one I'd like to think Henri might agree with: revolutionary citizenship is not a right: it has to be taken, recreated anew, struggled for – not rubber-stamped.

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