The Subjunctive Grammar of Hope
Not only may past and future be discovered within the present, but that our only access to future, or to past, is within the fleeting moment of the present.
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.
Home, Tradition, and the Mediterranean Landscape: The Uncanniness of the Italian Woman
On the one hand the contemporary Italian woman is exposed to the current debate about gender roles and emancipation and, on the other, her identity is still profoundly influenced by a traditional model to which she feels attached.
The Best Painting in Naples
In Caravaggio’s painting there is not even an apparent connection between heavenly and terrestrial worlds. The heavenly observers look down, but no one looks up to them. The long outstretched right hand of the lower angel descends, but he, unobserved by anyone below, does not act on the human world.
The Substance of Sicilian Puppet Theater: Past and Present
In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II, a Mafia boss walking through New York City’s Little Italy stops in front of an outdoor puppet theater performance to watch two knights wielding swords, then quickly turns away, remarking that the action is too violent for him.
Diamonds in the Rough: Synthetic Gems from Pliny to Lightbox
By the first century CE, the Roman author and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder took on the question of “rampant” fake gems in ancient Rome’s markets in the mineralogy section of his famous Historia Naturalis.
Archaeology’s Cutting Edge: Far Beyond the Science of Rubbish
Alone among all students of humanity, archaeologists study human biological and cultural change over the entire span of human existence. Our research extends from 2.5 million-year-old hominin camps in East Africa’s Rift Valley to a 19th-century pickle factory in Victorian London.
Does Turner Still Live? Considerations on the Popular Afterlife of the American Frontier
Turner began by noting a fact: that the official report of the results of the 1890 U.S. Census observed that it was no longer possible to draw a “frontier line” between the Canadian and Mexican borders, east of which was settled territory and west of which was unsettled. The “frontier line” had, up to then, demarcated the two regions.
The Modern Memory Hole: Cyberethics Unchained
Should society move toward the goal of “efficiency,” driven by transhumanist considerations and technological changes in the mechanical storage of information—at the expense of the ability to express a wide variety of thoughts and retain them in some form from which they can be retrieved by succeeding generations?
A Somewhat Reassuring Defense of Populism
Is any defense of populism, even a modest consoling one, an apology for demagoguery, xenophobia, racism, paranoia, and other evils associated with the term? This question goes to a deeper question: is populism a destructive force in a democracy, one that leads to dictatorship, messianic leadership, and uncontrolled passions of citizens willing to relinquish their liberties for social stability?
Managing Our Darkest Hatreds and Fears: Witchcraft from the Middle Ages to Brett Kavanaugh
As more and more of us live in vast conurbations, we have forgotten and are able to forget our own ultimate ends. It’s this sense of taboo and apprehension that modern paganism wants to omit. Instead of reuniting us with the dead and helping us to manage our fear of death, modern paganism proves to be another form of denial; this in itself makes its claims to historical revival hollow.
Immigration and Decency
We are looking for the right vocabulary to think about DACA children. The language of rights does not fit the bill. Neither does the dominant language in political theory for the last half-century, the language of justice, as derived from John Rawls’s book, A Theory of Justice.
Mythremembering: Memory and its Fictions
Given the fallible—or creative—nature of remembering, every story based on memories will inevitably depart from a superficially accurate description of “what happened,” that is, portray an alternate reality. Shaping the memory into a story exerts pressure to change and augment it.
Exile At Home, or At Home in Exile
In my thirty years of life, my time has been split among one year in New York, eleven years in São Paulo, and nineteen years in Dallas. After this experience visiting Brazil, I finally understood that I feel most at home not in a physical location, but when I’m surrounded by people who have accents in English.
Blinded
The sunshine of Tel Aviv never reached the Hausmans’ grocery store on Sirkin Street. Even though our rented apartment shared a courtyard with their shop, our place was sun-filled in the mornings, while the Hausmans’ store stayed perpetually dark.
A Tale of Two Memorials: Dallas and New York
The “twin voids” possessed the most concentrated form of emptiness I had ever experienced. They made the night sky with its planes, planets, stars, planets, and city light, seem abuzz with life by comparison. Even Rothko’s furry blacks or Reinhardt’s all-over pictorial blackness seem friendlier and less empty than these did.
Berlin, Intersecting Traumas
The preponderance of overlapping historical markers of the city is not new. Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire (1987) narrates the visible and invisible coexistences of different layers of time. Different pasts and presents intertwine in the celebrated movie.
