[Doubt] alone can provide true repose and security of our spirits. Have all the greatest and most noble philosophers and wise men who have professed doubt been in a state of anxiety and suffering? But they say: to doubt, to consider both points of view, to put off a decision, is this not painful? I reply, it is indeed for fools, but not for wise men. It is painful for people who cannot stand freedom, for those who are presumptuous, partisan, passionate and who, obstinately attached to their opinions, arrogantly condemn all others. ... Such people, in truth, know nothing. They do not even know what it is to know something. - Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom (Originally published 1601: keep in mind that publishing ideas like this during this era in Europe could get you called into an Inquisition hearing and risk execution for heresy/atheism)-------------------------------------------------
"In 25TH HOUR Spike Lee takes the story of a convicted drug dealer's last day of freedom and expands it into a meditation on New York and America in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001… From the opening credits sequence, showing two beams of blue light where the World Trade Center once stood, to the closing moments, which evoke the dream of the wide-open road, Lee takes the spiritual moment and crystallizes it into art. The result is a film of sadness and power, the first great 21st century movie about a 21st century subject… With a slice-of-life film such as 25TH HOUR, there's always the challenge of how to end it. Lee and screenwriter David Benioff bring the film to a place of poetry, with a fantasy of America and open spaces that's slightly funny and mostly stirring and still very much about New York." - Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
Close your eyes and think about the cult leaders you’ve seen portrayed in movies—the David Koresh stand-ins with long hair, spewing pseudo-intellectual musings with their questionable charisma. Then think of the challenge Philip Seymour Hoffman had in The Master—how he had to be radiantly respectable on the surface, rotten to the core beneath, presenting a veneer that masked deep-seated insidiousness. Truth is, we could’ve gone with any number of PSH’s performances in the 21st century—it greatly pains us to leave his work in Doubt, Capote, Charlie Wilson’s War, Along Came Polly, and especially Synecdoche, New York on the cutting-room floor—but it ultimately felt right to go with the role that captured him at his loudest and quietest, his most charming and most villainous. The processing interrogation in the bowels of the boat—where Hoffman’s L. Ron Hubbard avatar, Lancaster Dodd, and Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell volley back and forth—is on the short list for best-acted scenes of the century, but there are plenty of indelible moments to choose from: the hand job, the unexpected motorcycle send-off, the volcanic detonation of “pig fuck.” The Master is also PSH’s final major work outside of the Hunger Games franchise, which conjures a heartbreaking question: If he had lived past the age of 46, would he have had another role that surpassed this? —Sayles
A year after Oregon endures its most destructive fire season on record in 2020, state lawmakers order a map estimating the wildfire risk for every property in the state. It’s the kind of rating now available on real estate sites like Zillow. The state wants to use the results to decide where it will apply forthcoming codes for fire-resistant construction and protections around homes. Around the same time, insurance companies start dropping Oregon homeowners’ policies and raising premiums to limit future losses, much as they have done in other disaster-prone states. Insurers have their own sophisticated risk maps to guide them, but some brokers instead tell homeowners the blame lies with the map the state produced. The belief gets treated as fact both on social media and in mainstream news — even though insurers and regulators say it’s not true. The anger quickly spreads. Not only is Oregon’s map seen as at fault for higher insurance premiums, one conservative talk radio host calls it an attempt to “depopulate rural areas.” People in an anti-map Facebook group start musing about “Agenda 21,” a conspiracy theory implicating the United Nations in an effort to force people into cities so they can be more easily controlled."]
Mann, Itamar and Lihi Yona. "Defending Jews From the Definition of Antisemitism." UCLA Law Review (December 23, 2024) ["The 2023 Israel-Gaza conflict has ignited an intense legal and ethical debate over the definition of antisemitism, leaving deep scars on communities and college campuses. This debate clashes over one major question: does sharp criticism of Israel amount to antisemitic speech? Through various legal instruments, U.S. law has accepted this premise. This Article argues against such stretching of the definition of antisemitism and develops a novel legal framework to challenge it. Existing scholarship has shown that antisemitism is often weaponized against Palestinians and their liberation struggle. Widening the scope of this critique, we theorize an additional layer of harm imposed upon American Jews. We argue that the broadening of the definition of antisemitism has resulted in a narrowing of Jewish identity and a delegitimization of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish communities. Constructing Jewish identity along rigid and fixed lines, the contemporary legal definition of antisemitism imposes upon Jews a straitjacket of Zionism. This Article begins by explaining the peculiar positionality of Jews within the U.S. liberal legal order, examining how Jewish communities have often articulated political commitments through religious vocabularies. As such, Jewish identity presents a challenge for American liberal ideas regarding religion. The redefinition of antisemitism to protect the state of Israel reflects a failed attempt to respond to this challenge. It favors one specific version of Jewish identity (Zionist) while suppressing others. The Article then moves on to track the evolution of the legal definition of antisemitism vis-à-vis the state of Israel, from post-WWII cases, to what we dub as the “IHRA- era.” The codification of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism has stigmatized anti-Zionists and other critics of Israel as antisemites. Following a detailed account of the harms to pro-Palestinian actors, we advance to the heart of our argument, arguing that IHRA-type rules discipline Jewish identity and diminish the richness of Jewish political traditions. To combat this harm, the Article develops two legal arguments. First, we argue that for many American Jews, criticizing Israel is a way to exercise their religious freedom. Further, we argue, the redefinition of antisemitism should be seen as a governmental interference in religion, deciding the content of Jewish identity, in violation of the Establishment Clause. Second, we argue that antidiscrimination laws should protect Jews who are targeted as Jews due to their political position. We recognize two types of discriminatory dynamics: (1) discrimination based on association and solidarity with Palestinians; and (2) discrimination based on stereotypes regarding how Jews ought to perform their identity."]
Mughal, Alisha. "It Can't Rain All the Time: The Crow." New Books in Film (August 13, 2025) ["Alisha Mughal's It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow (ECW Press, 2025) weaves memoir with film criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural resonance. A passionate analysis of the ill-fated 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting influence on action movies, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinity Released in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences thanks to the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the film: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set due to a mishandled prop gun. But it soon became clear that The Crow was more than just an accumulation of its tragic parts. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s performance was “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.” In It Can’t Rain All the Time, Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee’s death by exposing the most challenging human emotions in all their dark, dramatic, and visceral glory, so much so that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal, messy work. By the end of the movie, we realize that Eric has presented us with a vast range of emotions and that masculinity doesn’t need to be hard and impenetrable. Through her memories of seeking solace in the film during her own grieving period, Mughal brilliantly shows that, for all its gothic sadness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a movie about redemption and hope."]
Odell, Jenny and David Rooney. "Deep Time: The Tyranny of Time." To the Best of Our Knowledge (June 3, 2023) ["When you’re on the clock, you’re always running out of time – because in our culture, time is money. The relentless countdown is making us and the planet sick. But clock time isn’t the only kind. There are older, deeper rhythms of time that sustain life. What would it be like to live more in tune with nature’s clocks? Lately it’s been feeling like time is speeding up. Whether it’s the news cycle, social media, the information economy or global warming, the pace of life is accelerating beyond what many of us can handle. Jenny Odell blames the clock. Clocks control us – but who controls clocks? David Rooney gives us a brief political history of clocks. And a look at their future."]
Sachdev, Shaan. "The Gaza Generation." Los Angeles Review of Books (August 9, 2025) ["Inflamed by the first vivid global atrocities in their lifetimes, the young protesters of Gaza’s cleansing were met not just with arrests and defenestrations but also, and more revealingly, with accusations of hysteria. The excesses of the 2020 protests and their aftermath, distilled by critics as “wokeness” and “DEI,” were, in the minds of such critics, comparable, if not equally frivolous, to a campaign against genocide. The on-campus rage and rigidity that met mass slaughter, mass maiming, mass starvation, and mass displacement—broadcast in real time and financed by American taxpayers—were dismissed as little more than pugnacious overreactions to a political inevitability. Thinly enshrouded in the critics’ purportedly cultural distaste was a devastating political truth: Palestinians, even more so than the Iraqis before them, were ontological featherweights, scarcely important enough to matter, even in bulk, even in totality. Palestinian children, too, were somehow tainted, guilty by association from birth, and thus less intrinsically human than Israeli children. The murder of more than 50,000 people, two-thirds of them estimated to be women and children—in apartments, in schools, in hospitals, in cars, in tents—and the displacement of millions more were not, then, taken at face value by those who sneered at the hysterical generation. The murders were contextualized. They were qualified. Israeli officials and American Zionists could justify the violence by pointing to the Israelis killed on October 7, while Palestinians and their supporters were disgustedly forsworn as apologists of terrorism if they pointed to the 616 Palestinians killed between 2006 and 2007, the 165 Palestinians killed in 2012, the 2,203 Palestinians killed in 2014, the 256 Palestinians killed in 2021, or the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed, mutilated, disabled, or expelled between 1948 and 1981, all before October 7, 2023."]
Schaake, Marietje. "Can Democracy Coexist with Big Tech." Capitalisn't (September 26, 2024) ["International technology policy expert, Stanford University academic, and former European parliamentarian Marietje Schaake writes in her new book that a “Tech Coup” is happening in democratic societies and fast approaching the point of no return. Both Big Tech and smaller companies are participating in it, through the provision of spyware, microchips, facial recognition, and other technologies that erode privacy, speech, and other human rights. These technologies shift power to the tech companies at the expense of the public and democratic institutions, Schaake writes. Schaake joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss proposals for reversing this shift of power and maintaining the balance between innovation and regulation in the digital age. If a "tech coup" is really underway, how did we get here? And if so, how can we safeguard democracy and individual rights in an era of algorithmic governance and surveillance capitalism? Marietje Schaake’s new book, “The Tech Coup: Saving Democracy From Silicon Valley."]
Seymour, Richard. "The Debt to David Graeber." The LRB Podcast (September 3, 2025) ["When David Graeber died in 2020, at the age of 59, he left not only a substantial body of work on economic and social anthropology, and high-profile books including Debt: The First 5000 Years and Bullshit Jobs, but also a legacy as an influential political activist and leading figure in the Occupy movement, credited with contributing the slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’. Following the publication of a new collection of Graeber’s essays, Richard Seymour joins Tom to survey his thought, ranging from the theories of power Graeber developed from his early field research in Madagascar to the daring arguments of his posthumous work, Dawn of Everything (co-written with David Wengrow) challenging the orthodox view of how egalitarian and hierarchical societies developed over the past thirty thousand years. Richard Seymour is a writer and theorist whose books include Disaster Nationalism and The Twittering Machine."]
Song, Lisa. "The Trump Administration Is Promoting Its Anti-Trans Agenda Globally at the United Nations." Pro Publica (August 5, 2025) ["The delegates included federal civil service employees and the associate director of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s policies, who now works for the State Department. They delivered these statements during U.N. forums on topics as varied as women’s rights, science and technology, global health, toxic pollution and chemical waste. Even a resolution meant to reaffirm cooperation between the U.N. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations became an opportunity to bring up the issue. Insisting that everyone’s gender is determined biologically at birth leaves no room for the existence of transgender, nonbinary and intersex people, who face discrimination and violence around the world. Intersex people have variations in chromosomes, hormone levels or anatomy that differ from what’s considered typical for male and female bodies. A federal report published in January just before President Donald Trump took office, estimated there are more than 5 million intersex Americans. ... At the U.N., the administration has promoted other aspects of its domestic agenda. For example, U.S. delegates have demanded the removal of references to tackling climate change and voted against an International Day of Hope because the text contained references to diversity, equity and inclusion. (The two-page document encouraged a “more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth” and welcomed “respect for diversity.”)"]
West, Stephen. "The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism." Philosophize This! #235 (September 3, 2025) ["Today we talk about one of Han's earlier books where he offers an alternative to classic western ideas about subjectivity. We talk about Zen as a religion without God. Substance and emptiness. Alternatives to the reified self. Dwelling nowhere. Original friendliness. And death as an event we desperately try to control."]
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