Browsing Category Essay
-
Essay 0
Looking at Atrocities with John Berger
By BRUCE ROBBINS I use the word “atrocity” to signify an act of cruelty judged to be extreme or outrageous because it is collective, unnecessary, and/or indiscriminate. John ...
-
Essay 0
Is Citizenfour a Useful Film?
By JILL GODMILOW One early June evening in 2015 I walked out of the IFC Cinema into the roar of traffic heading up 6th Avenue in New York ...
-
Essay 0
I Am a Vampire
By JAMES LIVINGSTON I am a vampire. There, I’ve said it. It’s not easy. To be honest, I think I’d rather be a werewolf. Those guys kill people ...
-
Essay 0
On “Freedom of Expression” and the Question of “Blasphemy”
By ETIENNE BALIBAR [Note: This handout accompanied a presentation by Etienne Balibar in the Columbia University Seminar on Literary Theory, December 3, 2015. The respondent was Souleymane Bashir Diagne ...
-
Essay 0
Power Talking: A Commentary on Balibar
By BRUCE ROBBINS When I lived in Switzerland in the late 70s and played (badly) for a local basketball team, one or two of my teammates tried out some ...
-
Essay 0
A Tale of Two Systems: On Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight
By LISA FLUET Tom McCarthy’s film Spotlight (2015) recounts the Boston Globe’s early-2000s investigative reportage on the Boston archdiocesan hierarchy’s long history of routinized cover-ups of clerical sexual abuse of minors. The film ...
-
Essay 0
Divide and Rule: On Watching Denmark’s Borgen
By LAUREN M. E. GOODLAD Toward the end of the first season of Borgen (2010-13), Bent Sejrø, the aging mentor to Birgitte Nyborg, who is Denmark’s prime minister, advises her ...
-
Essay 0
Stolen Oscars
By OLIVIA RUTIGLIANO On a hot day in the summer of 2013, I sat in my Los Angeles hotel room, waiting for a phone call from my contact, a ...
-
Essay 0
How To Think About Socialism: A Primer
By JAMES LIVINGSTON 1) Socialism is not the exclusive property of “the” working class, whatever the fuck that means these days, or meant a hundred years ago. In ...
-
Essay 0
Spain: a Crisis of Social Democracy
By JOHN McCLURE In June of 2013, David Unger wrote a prescient editorial piece in the New York Times about the collapse of European social democracy. In the ...
