Desks
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, […]
Political Slogans
LOVE TRUMPS HATE If this slogan claims to state a fact about the world, it is quite obviously false. If it offers a metaphysical principle, it is even falser: love and hate […]
Neoliberals, Neocons, and Neofascists Unite! Trumpism and the New Political Order
Much has rightly been made of how the US Election, like Brexit before it, represents a devastating rebuke of the status quo. Most famously, Michael Moore predicted the improbable vote “to be […]
The Industrial Fire of American Democracy
Today, the morning after the election of Donald Trump, the massive and abandoned Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna, NY (just south of Buffalo) became engulfed in fire. I live in close proximity, in another […]
Remembrance of Things Past
The Jewish writer Edmond Amran El Maleh, also known in some academic circles in America as the James Joyce of Morocco, once wrote a novel with the symbolic title: Mille ans, un […]
A Triumph for the Dangerous Profession: New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2016
In the August 14, 2016 edition of its Magazine, devoted to the theme of “Fractured Lands,” the New York Times achieved new depth and scope in the coverage of perhaps the signal […]
Norbert’s Nightmares: On Zombie Wars, with a Nod to Cybernetics
There is no homeostasis whatsoever. We are in the business of cycles of booms and failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in wars which everyone loses, which are so real […]
Tesla’s Model 3 as Ikon of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
March 31, 2016: Around the world people are queuing in front of Tesla stores in order to reserve a Model 3 for a $1000.00 US deposit—without knowing basic facts about the car, […]