I’ve been enjoying this song by Andrew Bird called Tables and Chairs. It’s a nice corrective to the kind of ascetic-activist denial-of-fun to which I and some of my political co-conspirators can be prone. (Who said that thing about if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution?) The song ends: [...]
Author Archives:
Neoliberalism and Conscription
21-Apr-08One of the best articles I’ve read recently is Deborah Cowen’s Fighting for Freedom: The End of Conscription in the United States and the Neoliberal Project of Citizenship. It’s a really tight, focused read on the relationship between the restructuring of welfare programs in the U.S. and the end of the draft/launch of an all-volunteer [...]
Frakkin’ Airlocked!
19-Apr-08After what I think most of us agreed was a lackluster start, Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica got so good this past week. Obviously, I am freaking the frak out. In case you still think you are too cool for a show set in outer space, watch this recap of Seasons 1 through 3 and [...]
We’re In a Warehouse
16-Apr-08There was some interesting conversation about student evaluations over at Scatterplot a bit ago. One thought I’d add to the conversation — in some cases (I’ve had this experience) what is so upsetting about negative student evaluations (especially public ones, or public sites like Ratemyprofessor), is that they are right. Or at least touch on [...]
New State Spaces
14-Jan-08My digging into the history of welfare states and state theory has led me to New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, by Neil Brenner. The book offers an incredible synthesis of writing on the state and globalization from the past several decades towards a theory and method of scale analysis. Brenner [...]