Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of... Read more
For those who are interested, I include below the preliminary table of chapter contents for my (as yet unwritten) book, The Creation Project. Along with essays relevant to each chapter. More to come. 1/ Introduction: An Immodest Proposal for Immodest Times Chapter 1 of The Creation Project establishes the foundation premises of the book: that anthropogenic climate change, breaching inequality, toxically “illiberal” nationalism, and generational abandonment have scaled our risks as a species to a level well beyond the scope... Read more
Imbibing the insinuating logic of “natural law,” “originalist” and “textualist” methods, Neil Gorsuch heralds a new era that transforms judges into priests of the occult who examine the entrails of ancient texts on behalf of ancient concepts of order that have almost nothing to do with the rule of law or the values of justice and equity or the lived experiences of Americans inhabiting a tottering planet in the 21st century. Gorsuch is worth studying because (far more than his old high school chum Brett Kavanaugh) he illustrates what a federal judiciary dominated by attorneys birthed and cossetted within the insular folds of the Federalist Society will look like as the Senate’s Sorting Hat speeds Trump-appointed judges to federal courts that each increasingly resemble the Hogwarts House of Slytherin. Read more
This article originally appeared on the Ploughshares Fund website. For nearly 40 years, Ploughshares Fund has supported the most effective people and organizations in the world to reduce and eventually eliminate the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. Since 1981, Ploughshares Fund has distributed nearly $100 million in grants to organization such as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the William Perry Project. Please consider donating to the Ploughshares Fund. Gael Tarleton is a Ploughshares Fund... Read more
Following the 2016 presidential election, Politico published a really interesting post (and podcast) about Chuck Todd’s experiences interviewing Donald Trump, with insights about Trump’s daddy issues, Trump’s not-laughing issues, and Trump’s manipulative-messing-with-the-media-pajama-interview issues. But far and away, the most interesting Chuck Todd insight concerned Trump’s visual-and-meta-visual issues, which captures a truth about contemporary politics that extends well beyond Trump to the structural foundations of our political imagination. The consequences of this visual perspective on politics are far-reaching and important for how we think about... Read more
Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists. – Sarah Palin (NRA annual meeting, 2014) Guns give us a pretty clear and simple way to think about this gross (orange) hairball we’ve just coughed up. In the United States, guns are collocative with a host of other right-wing cultural tropes that have found their way into our political idiom (white supremacy, states rights, limited government, homophobia, biblical fundamentalism, military zeal, homespun rural values and toxic nostalgia, among others). Did we assume (because... Read more