In this review of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, Miki Kashtan explains what bullshit jobs are and how they can help us understand “the rightward turn of so many voters around the world.”
Ecological Transformation
Book Review: The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail
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Deena Metzger calls Dahr Jamail’s new book a record of “the terrible knowledge, moral anguish, and great love of a journalist who embeds himself in the physical reality that the natural world is suffering.”
Reviews
“As ‘Infinity Goes on Trial’, All There Is – Is”
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Aubrey L Glazer asks: “how does this devotional poetry relate to, and even sing, like prayer in a post-secular context?”
Politics & Society
Inside Germany’s New Crypto-Nazi Party – an AfD Dissident’s Report
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Thomas Klikauer reviews Franziska Schreiber’s Inside the AFD, shedding light on the rise of Neo-Nazism in Germany.
Reviews
Gershom Scholem: When The Mythmaker Becomes The Myth
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Martin Kavka argues that our renewed interest in the life and work of Gershom Scholem is due, in part, to the fact that “what constitutes a properly Jewish life in the United States has now become utterly perplexing and mysterious.”
Arts & Cultural Critique
The War on Neighborhoods
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In his review of Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper’s The War on Neighborhoods, Theodore Richards breaks down the false dichotomy between individual and community.
Arts & Cultural Critique
Roth’s Enduring Commitment
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Summing up the life of Philip Roth is not easy, but Evan Brier tries by beginning at the end.
Global Capitalism
What’s Wrong With Western ‘Progress’?: Challenges to Stephen Pinker and Nicholas Kristof
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Charles Eisenstein and Jeremy Lent challenge the mainstream champion of the status quo Stephen Pinker and the NY Times columnist (and human rights advocate) Nicholas Kristof in their willingness to promote a view of the world that cheerily suggests that global capitalism is really doing great, despite all that we know to the contrary.
Reviews
Review of Ariel Dorfman’s Book “Darwin’s Ghosts”
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Deena Metzger reviews the novel “Darwin’s Ghosts” by Ariel Dorfman, not quite a coming of age story or hero’s journey, but a journey where a young boy must learn who he is outside of the superficial life to which he presumed he was entitled
Reviews
Killing White Innocence
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Stephen Brookfield reviews “Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America” by George Yancy and reflects on the importance of understanding identity within a racist system.
“I’m Crazy, but I’m Normal”: The Banality of Baruch Marzel
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Shaul Magid reviews the film “A Radical Jew” by Noam Osband. Arendt was accused of diminishing Eichmann’s evil by claiming it was banal. But maybe the reverse is true. Maybe the banality of evil is actually the most dangerous kind.
Politics & Society
Reflections on Fraud and Deceit: Or, Four Splendid Summer Reads
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Like Woolf’s soliloquies, Hoang’s cry out in despair, ranging in topic from the death of her sister to the verbal abuses of her then-boyfriend. And yet, like Woolf’s, her language somehow basks in that despair, flourishing even.
Reviews
Picture This
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The Power of Pictures:
Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film
The Jewish Museum, New York
September 25, 2015–February 7, 2016
National Tour: Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN; and Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Review by Roslyn Bernstein
As critics of contemporary fiction, drama, and the arts know full well, finding the narrative in a work can often be an elusive search. Characters appear and disappear, images surface and dissolve, and the story lurches forwards and backwards, pushing and pulling the reader, the viewer, and the audience in disparate directions. What does it all mean? we ask. Where are we going?
Politics & Society
The Psyche in Psychedelic
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Entheogens, Society & Law: Towards a Politics of Consciousness, Autonomy & Responsibility
by Daniel Waterman
Review by Stephen Mo Hanan
Reviews
Beyond Self-Blame: Destigmatizing Unemployment
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Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences
by Ofer Sharone
Review by Amy Mazur