The Future of the Humanities and the Specter of Antisemitism
According to the sages, God begins with one and not two, so that no one can say to another, “My side of the family is better than your side of the family”: there is only one side of the human family, with all the ethical obligations that come to bear in being part of the human family.
The Thin Crust of Civilization
The ability to see patterns is predictive of a strong belief in them, which can easily become a faith in the unseen workings of power.
The Evolution and Extinction of Lady Liberty
Abstracted women as symbols of liberty on U.S. coins contrasted starkly with the personification of British and Spanish monarchs on their coins.
Four Images of a Neapolitan Rebellion
Visual representation of a rebellion like Masaniello’s is tricky, because an artist needs to choose to present just a moment of a temporally extended action.
Dismantling Living Legacies of White Supremacy
Inspired by student outrage and global anti-racist activism, faculty, staff, and students at UT Dallas have organized a series of teach-ins organized around the theme of “Living Legacies of White Supremacy at UTD and Beyond.”
Damn Lies and Statistics: A Critique of Probability
The threshold (the present moment) of the past (all that might be known for certain) abuts upon the radical otherness of the unpredictable future.
Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism
Men and women like Marsden imagined themselves in an international, millennial battle for the spiritual salvation of everyone, enslaved and free. The activism of black Christians appeared to them a distraction for the more holy work of expanding salvation for all.
NFTs: The Afterlife of the Aura
NFTs are liable to physically attack the artworks they represent as long as there is a financial incentive for them to do so—and such an incentive is hard-wired into their blockchain nature.
President Biden, Langston Hughes, and the Expansion of the American Dream
Once treated as tangential to American politics, Hughes’s “dream deferred” is now being imagined as a means to guide and expand political approaches to “the American Dream.”
Digital Art NFTs: The Marriage of Art & Money
The real ethical objection to the rise of NFTs involves the elimination of aesthetics itself as a discrete sphere of human experience.
Britten’s Albert Herring
An artist needs to have inspiration upon which to draw beyond being told what to do on stage—, the kind of inspiration that might arise from having thought seriously about the novel.
The Inceptions of Deception
Deception is exceedingly speedy, a masterpiece of succinctness, propulsion, and focused kinesis; it races like a film helmed by a director notorious for quick shoots.
Dealing with Disappointment in Democracy
Healthy democracies deal with the disappointment they continuously generate by keeping “winners” and “losers” fluid, always open to reconstitution, not hard-and-fast divisions.
From Laboratory to Museum
Many of the notes written on the pages provide mundane details of the experiments—things a researcher would write as a record for future reference—but across the top of the left page in large, all-capital letters are the words: “TOLL, TOLL, TOLL.”
Voyaging with Charles Darwin on the Beagle
We have to imagine the father of evolutionary science clambering over volcanic landscapes, reeking of sweat, covered in dirt and beetles, like some kind of animistic shaman communing with the wilderness.
Endless
These five poems tell the story of a life. Written between January and April of 2020, they explore my desire to understand the reverberations of physical trauma on me and those I love.
