Outside of the obvious, 9/11 is also the day when I lost my friend and mentor, Marshall Berman (1940-2013). Maybe another time I’ll share some more personal thoughts about Marshall, but for now, I thought I’d share a book chapter that I wrote about his work. It’s in Jennifer Corby’s excellent volume, Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman, and in many ways, it’s the piece of writing of which I’m most fond. And I’m fond of it because I know that my writing style isn’t like Marshall’s style, but this piece is probably as close as I’ve ever come. His spirit was not only in the content but the style foo, and I think he’d really have loved that.
Read MoreThere's this great scene in the first John Wick movie that I often rewatch, and that always gets me thinking about how we think about "action" movies. They're generally considered a pretty low-brow form of entertainment, and they are, so I wouldn't dispute that point. But that said, every once in a while an action movie comes along that makes me think we need to rethink the genre.
Read MoreThe Covid pandemic has me thinking about how we could rank social, political, and economic institutions on a mortality index.
Read MoreYesterday, I read a short article in The Paris Review written by a former CUNY student (not one of mine) about her experience studying Joyce's Ulysses at CCNY. The article recounted the transformative nature of her experience against the backdrop of the chronic (and criminal) underfunding of CUNY, and was ultimately a paean to public education. But there was a tone to the article that I found a little off-putting and that I think unintentionally captures an unwelcome truth about the American class system: our criticisms often serve to reinforce it.
Read MoreIf numerology were acceptable evidence in academic circles, today would be the day that proves my work right, because it was on May 5 that both Søren Kierkegaard (1813) and Karl Marx (1818) were born. Two of my most important intellectual forebears, I’ve long thought that they were really two sides of the same coin, and that together they provide a comprehensive account of freedom and selfhood. But if numerology isn’t convincing, I thought I’d share a short excerpt from my book, exploring the idea of revolutionary subjectivity.
Read MoreI've been reading another John Le Carré novel and it's helped confirm a thought I had earlier: he's a master of writing about bureaucracy. Yes, he write about spies, but as in the United States, Britain's spy agency is a massive government bureaucracy. And for all the intrigue, his stories often revolve around the politics within such bureaucratic organizations. They're stories that revolve around the petty squabbles, budgetary fights, the incompetence of upper management, and the careerism that so often trumps competence, and that sees pedigree repeatedly triumph over talent and hard work. And I think this is a big part of the appeal: the intrigue draws you in, but at the end of the day, he’s writing about our workplaces.
Read MoreThe story about Governor Andrew Cuomo has been getting a little more press lately, but for those of us who followed it, this was all evident back at the beginning of the pandemic. In short, Cuomo ordered thousands of COVID-19 positive patients back into nursing homes, where as you would expect, the virus spread rampantly and killed many thousands of people. Beyond this, he also allowed the nursing home industry to cut many corners, virtually ensuring viral spread. Subsequently, to protect the nursing home industry from the legal liability that would ensue when thousands of people realized that their loved ones died because of their negligence, he passed a “liability shield” protecting nursing homes from liability (and which was written by the nursing home industry itself). In other words, if your family member died of COVID-19 in a nursing home, despite any negligence that might have occurred, you aren’t allowed to sue. To date, 26 other states have similarly turned Cuomo’s liability shield into law.
Read MoreOn inauguration day, I wrote the following Facebook post:
“It's interesting, but aside from my leftist friends, my foreign friends seem equally put off by today. The experience of living in another country, one in which politics isn't all just superficial pageantry atop grotesque policies, really opens your eyes to how insane this country is. When celebratory liberals discuss inauguration day in terms of the fashion choices of our political officials and the celebrities brought out to regale them, how could any of us be surprised that a former reality TV star became president? Call him a fascist if you will, but he's as American as apple pie and cruise missiles. I wonder how much this country would change if every American was forced to live elsewhere (not just tourist elsewhere) if only for a short while. Heck, I'd be happy if we could get them to only imagine living elsewhere.”
Read MoreOne of the more annoying takes that I've seen lately is that we need to wait and see before we criticize the new administration. Underlying this claim is the assertion that we can't yet make judgments because we lack the evidence on which to make them, and that this evidence will only be available after the administration takes power and starts acting. That is, until the Biden administration actually does "things," we can't judge those things. This claim therefore seems to be based on the very reasonable assertion that we shouldn't make judgments until we have evidence on which to make them. But as with many liberal myths, it’s disingenuous.
Read MoreThe system of COVID vaccine distribution is giving Americans a taste of what universal healthcare is all about. For obvious reasons, advocates of M4A usually draw attention to the way that universal healthcare solves the problem of the uninsured and the underinsured, not to mention problems of medical bankruptcy and so forth. However, vaccine distribution is also demonstrating that a universal healthcare system is a fundamentally rational system of healthcare while a privatized system is a fundamentally irrational one.
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