By Jaime Karnes. "I folded my problems into pretty paper animals to keep me company. I set them on the Formica dinette set. I jammed some into cracks so they'd stand up straight: organized warfare." A...| Tumblr
By Nat Schmookler. “There’s an immediate sense one has, which must be relied on, which we can’t not trust, that says: that’s just wrong.” _______________________________________________________________________ David Bromwich has proved himself to be that rarest kind of intellectual: one whose interests have broadened over time. After honing his academic chops on William Hazlitt as a young man, he has since expanded to aesthetics, 19th-century American history, William Wordsworth, a...| The Utopian
By Justin E. H. Smith. “Down with Putin. Down with the Patriarch. Down with the Pope. Down with the self-styled progressives who have abandoned the liberatory spirit of 1968 in favor of the regulatory spirit of identitarianism.” —————————————————————————————- My, what a year it’s been, so far. I spent the first week of it happily writing an overdue article on philosophical debates about avian vocalization—birdsong—from Arist...| The Utopian
By Ted Fertik. “We don’t yet know what happens to freely-elected left-leaning governments when their populations rebel against them not because they want less social justice, but because they want more.” Why Brazil’s middle-class rebelled. _______________________________________________________________________ What makes the Brazilian political crisis unique among the mass protests that have erupted in many corners of the globe over the past years is that its roots are to be found not...| The Utopian
By Sam Munson. “I knew I was lost. Or would be in moments, as soon as this peruke reached me, this peruke at rest on the splendid head of my old foe, my single foe, my one declared foe and thus my archfoe, the long-dead German philosopher Immanuel Kant.” A short story. ____________________________________________________________________ I thought only Sligo had heard my moronic remark. But it became apparent, from the way Mark Dienst was twisting his mouth in embarrassment (mine, not his)...| The Utopian
By Justin E. H. Smith. “Thorough, scientific anthropology can amount to something close to advocacy: it shows the richness of other worlds, and therefore the tragedy of destroying them.” Justin E. H. Smith defends anthropology as science and advocacy—against both the postmodern turn and the simplistic scientism of Napoleon Chagnon. _____________________________________________________________________ “Among” is a curious preposition. Today it seems to be used mostly to describe the ...| The Utopian
By Kiel Brennan-Marquez. “Institutional politics can become a source of delight, no less imaginative than its revolutionary counterpart – but narrower, and more disciplined.” How the left should respond to injustice. ________________________________________________________________________ George Carlin once offered a memorable proposal to revamp the war on drugs. The year was 1996, and the American public was clamoring to make dealing a capital offense. Carlin found this solution miscon...| The Utopian
By Philip Mirowski. Neoliberals are not fundamentalists. But they approach crises with a certain logic–one that is directly relevant to comprehending neoliberalism’s unexpected strength in the current global crisis. _______________________________________________________________________ Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the neoliberal project stood out from other strains of right-wing thought in that it was self-consciously constituted as an entity dedicated to the deve...| The Utopian
By Onur Alper. “Past struggles were predominantly aimed at taking over Turkey’s oppressive state apparatus. The Gezi Park movement, by contrast, seeks to introduce clear restraints on how the state apparatus should be run.” A Letter from Istanbul. ____________________________________________________________________ Two weeks ago I returned to my hometown, Istanbul. Government plans to root up a park in the city center to build an imitation of historical barracks had just given rise to a...| The Utopian
By Zeynep Pamuk. “The Gezi Park movement is fundamentally about demanding the right to demand rights.“ A Letter From Istanbul. _______________________________________________________________________ Last Saturday afternoon, a sea of people with flags in one hand and gas masks in the other assembled in Beşiktaş—a central neighborhood in Istanbul—ready to march to Gezi Park. A young man standing on top of a minivan was yelling directions into a megaphone: “Please leave all party fla...| The Utopian
By Ian Buruma. Turkey’s protests are as much about class and power as they are about religion. But the real question is: Can they make the country more liberal? ____________________________________________________________________ One interpretation of the anti-government demonstrations now roiling Turkish cities is that they are a massive protest against political Islam. What began as a rally against official plans to raze a small park in the center of Istanbul to make way for a kitschy sho...| The Utopian
By Thomas Meaney. “Koreans voted for Ms. Park not so much out of nostalgia for her father’s iron fist, as out of longing for a time when the future seemed brighter than it does today.” A Letter from South Korea. __________________________________________________________________ The dictator’s daughter has entered the Blue House. Park Geun-hye was sworn in last month as South Korea’s first female head of state, on the wings of the memory of her father, Park Chung-hee, who ruled the ...| The Utopian
By Simon Taylor. “I don’t go back to my own stuff. As time gets thinner and shorter, the desire to push on is much stronger. I used to reread myself all the time. I thought a bottle of wine and a five-hour read of me was the ideal evening. But I don’t feel that anymore.” Martin Amis talks about Lionel Asbo and the technical inferiority of his earlier novels. __________________________________________________________________________ The Utopian: You’re reading Goldhagen? Martin Amis:...| The Utopian
| The Utopian
By Yascha Mounk. “Philosophy is about deciding what to think, not about convincing other people what to think.” In his most extensive interview to date, Tim Scanlon talks about free will, choice, punishment, blame, tolerance, and the future of liberalism - as well as about his childhood and intellectual development. ______________________________________________________________________ This is a lightly edited and significantly shortened version of the interview. For the full version, whi...| The Utopian
By George Kateb. “Our quarrel with populism is a quarrel with democracy. ‘The more democracy, the better’ is not true - whether in political, social, or cultural life.” Six points on populism and its perils. ______________________________________________________________________________ Our quarrel with populism is a quarrel with democracy. We often do not seem to know what we are quarrelling with: democracy in general or populism in particular. In the United States, there were quite a...| The Utopian
By Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. “We cannot call for the defence of the Western world.” In 1956, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer sat down to write an updated version of the Communist Manifesto. These are previously unpublished notes from their discussions. __________________________________________________________________________________ 12 March 1956 (as recorded by Gretel Adorno and translated by Rodney Livingstone.) Horkheimer: Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of...| The Utopian
By Adam Etinson. “Rather than worry about how we might preserve the utopian status of human rights into the future, we ought to worry about how to rescue utopia from the clutches of human rights. ” A plea for substantive utopias. _______________________________________________________________________________ A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it...| The Utopian
By Samuel Moyn. “There is a risk that human rights will be called on to do so much, precisely because no powerful imaginative alternatives exist, that they will lose even the minimal promise of transformation that allow the norms to inspire so many.” A response to Adam Etinson. _________________________________________________________________________ After Utopia is the title of a little-known book — her first — by the great political theorist Judith Shklar, one of my favorite authors...| The Utopian
By Yascha Mounk. “Let us drop the deluded pretense that the defense of intellectual property is inherently conservative, or even reactionary.” Why our society would be less egalitarian and artistic without intellectual property rights. ________________________________________________________________________________ Given how technical a topic intellectual property is, most debates about it are strikingly emotional and partisan. Opponents of intellectual property cast movie studios, record...| The Utopian