Desks
Voicing Oolboon: The Work of Feminist Rage in a Climate of Sexual Misconduct
CW: Sexual Assault Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell? I believe […]
Imaginary Resilience: Christian Petzold’s “Transit”
Christian Petzold’s current “Transit” is a stunning recreation of what the World War II refugee scene must have been like, particularly as, one by one, the “lines of flight” out of precarious […]
Muhammad Zafzaf’s The Elusive Fox
Muhammad Zafzaf’s The Elusive Fox Moroccan literature written in Arabic has never made a name for itself outside of the Arab world. A rare exception would be Mohamed Choukri who owes his […]
Lee Chang Dong’s “Barn Burning” (2018): Adaptation in Full Torque
Lee Chang Dong’s masterpiece, “Burning” (2018), currently winding its way along the screens of art cinema, is a guided tour through the contemporary Korean economy and its cultural surround. All the more […]
How Trump’s Followers Construct Alt-Truth from Lies, Part 2: Daemonic Invention
Commentators describe Trump as a leader who thinks he is telling the truth but who in fact lies constantly to followers, followers who know he lies but believe he does so intentionally […]
How Trump’s Followers Construct Alt-Truth from Lies, Part 1: A Deep Story for Shallow Deception
I first began to think about this topic early in the 2016 presidential campaign. At that time, no one took Donald Trump’s run for office seriously. Most commentators didn’t think even Trump […]
Grand Strategy and Curricular Politics: Book Review–John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy
John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy, New York, Penguin Press, 2018, xi-xiv, 368 pp. Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right […]
How We Look: #MeToo at the Movies, 2
The premise of Claire Denis’s recent “Let the Sunshine In” (Un beau soleil intérieur) may be a bit unconventional; but then in 2018, it is not the least bit difficult to entertain […]
#Me Too at the Movies: Précis
And no more turn aside and brood Upon love’s bitter mystery William Butler Yeats One of the surprising, but in the end most consequential casualties of the #MeToo movement may well be […]
Notes on Turbidity (The Bay as It Is)
I. The Turbidity of Classification Turbid. Latin turbidus confused, turbid, from turba, confusion, crowd, probably from Greek tyrbē, confusion. Measuring turbidity, defined as the cloudiness or haziness of a liquid, is relatively straightforward. Submerge a Secchi […]
Welcome to the Great Dismissal! Part 2
The question, in a nutshell, faced by New York Times opinion writers of remarkable diversity at the midterm reboot runs as follows: how do the Democrats retrofit their arguments such that they […]
Welcome to the Great Dismissal!
We live in an age when feedback loops—among which number critique—have reached so rapid a rate of acceleration that they coincide with and to some degree even anticipate the events ostensibly precipitating […]
14:41
We are 4: two adults, two children, 4 and 8, walking back from the Museum für Naturkunde, along Invalidenstraße, 10557 Berlin. We stop at 50-51, location of the Hamburger Bahnhof, the city’s […]
I you he she: Pronoun-ced Wisdom
I encountered Chantal Akerman’s films the year of her death, 2015. My breath got caught throughout as I sat in a dark room among others and watched some of the most […]
Back to the Critical Future: Romania
Exceptionality rules every attempt to narrativize the history or culture of the states (or quasi-national entities) making up the Balkans. And in this respect, Romania is no exception. Romania is the “Balkan” […]
Landscape and Memory: A Review of The Word for World is Still Forest
Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. […]
Freedom in the Wake of Autonomous Driving
President Barack Obama was the first guest in the seventh season of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which aired on December 30, 2015. The highly successful web series usually hosts […]
Ontology, Trump, and the Truth of Professional Wrestling: Part II – Competing Ontologies
In our previous post we showed how Christopher RayAlexander’s account of the poetics and politics of professional wrestling suffered from two lacunae: (1) an unwillingness to engage with manner in which the […]
Reporting From the Smoking Ruins of an Argument
If Hegel was correct in asserting in the Philosophy of Right that “the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk,” [1] my previous argument as to the […]
Culturally Endangered: A Review of “Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species”
At a time when the destructiveness of human beings, as a crudely unified force of nature, is bulldozed across the digital and analog spheres of life on Earth, Imagining Extinction (2016) challenges […]
Ontology, Trump, and the Truth of Professional Wrestling: Part I – RayAlexander’s Argument
We actually started writing this essay on November 2, 2016. For the previous few weeks, we’d been discussing how our own work on the ontology of professional wrestling intersects with Christopher RayAlexander’s […]
The Other Colombia and the Urban Form
One of the principles that has from the beginning guided the “Urbanities” corner of Feedback is that the urban form is today found everywhere. This postulate seems relatively uncontroversial. Writing in 2013, […]