Brazil Decided

The formula of the "99 percent" seems at once incredibly rhetorical and real. We are used to hyperbole; we are less used to an absurdly lopsided figure that is actually matched by a reality. Poetic figuration meets statistical validity.

Illustration by DonkeyHotey by A. Staley Groves I admit a smile crossed my face when I read Breitbart was rushed to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and pronounced dead. Not because his children would lose a father, nor his wife a husband.  Rather that the iconoclastic boy-warrior was...

It was in a moment of exasperation, one imagines, that Kant discovered what he named ‘the scandal of reason’ – reason’s tendency to get entangled in its own contradictions and thus degenerate into either dogma or uncertainty – a tendency that has haunted modern history.

Ricky Gervais as David Brent in The Office, BBC, 2001 From The Nation: “I approach philosophy somewhat the way we approach art,” Havel once confessed. Despite his lack of method, he took a reading of Heidegger and a handful of homegrown metaphors and set forth in his writing powerful...

Leonard Bernstein, his wife Felicia Montealegre and Don Cox, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party in the Bernsteins’ Park Avenue penthouse in Manhattan, January 14, 1970. From New York Magazine. From Eurozine: A discussion of “radical chic” – a term used to denounce criticism and radical thought as...

Richard Nixon by Michael A. Moodian The structure of the best tragedy should be not simple but complex and one that represents incidents arousing fear and pity—for that is peculiar to this form of art. —Aristotle in Poetics (335 BCE/1932, sec. 1452b) On September 29, 1945, Republican businessman Herman...

by Irakli Zurab Kakabadze Once again, we can see that almost the entire world is trembling with the expectation of change. It looks like the world is refusing to suffocate itself with the single philosophy and single ideology that is already there for the last 20 years. Events are...

DC Comics From Sign and Sight: The question of pro or contra the net or “intellectual property” is not being decided according to political parties but social criteria. It is important to understand that the lines drawn in the internet debate cut across all political orientations. There are internet...

Illustration by DonkeyHotey by Charlotte Noble By now, I’m sure you’ve all heard the story. In October 2011, Florida’s Governor Rick Scott singled out of anthropology as a useless major, igniting a flurry of heated discussions about the utility of anthropology as well as other liberal arts majors. For...

Sure, there’s the GOP symbol, but the real elephant in the room at any of the Republican debates since December has been the super PAC, the turbocharged political action committee able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political ads — as long as that spending isn’t...

Betty Benevolence wants to save the world. Yet she has crazy ideas about how to do it. When she sees a starving child, she steals his remaining food. When she sees someone in pain, she kicks him in the shins. When she sees a drowning man, she pours water...

Greece has a central position in the European imagination. Once modernity had established its legitimacy on the basis of antiquity, and a country such as Germany had constructed itself on a mystical affinity with Greece, it was impossible not to include Greece in the contemporary European scene.

Ron Paul speaking to supporters at a “victory rally” following the 2012 Iowa Republican Caucuses in Ankeny, Iowa. Photograph by Gage Skidmore by A. Staley Groves What the republican candidatura conceals in its paradoxical movement is the questionable duration of the American State. This question is concealed by the...

George Kennan From The New Yorker: Kennan thought that Americans were shallow, materialistic, and self-centered—he had the attitude of a typical mid-century European—and the more he saw of them the less fond of them he grew. “You have despaired of yourself,” he wrote in his diary after a visit...

Northern Distribution Network From Foreign Policy: When people read a news website, they don’t usually imagine that it is being run by a major producer of fighter jets and smart bombs. But when the Pentagon has its own vision of America’s foreign policy, and the funds to promote it,...

Michele Solmi by Steve A. Yetiv On November 7, 1973, Richard Nixon called for major proposals to deal with the energy crisis caused by the 1973 Arab oil embargo and for a grand national undertaking which, “by the end of the decade” would allow the United States to “have...