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Who Are These Women?
Along the ramparts of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art, there is a small exhibition of ancient female figurines, among them the oldest sculpture in the museum’s collection. What strange forms! Where are the supermodels, where are the Barbie dolls? At the confluence of second-wave feminism and post-Freudian psychohistory, the mid-twentieth century saw…
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Environmentalism as a Politics of Fear
My friend Bryan and I have been engaged in a discussion for several weeks now about the politics of environmentalism and the prospect of climate change. We are both of a rather ascetic bent, at heart—the sense that the only way forward for the human community is a simpler existence made of nonviolence, plant-eating, and…
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What Would Darwin Do?
Happy Darwin Day! If you didn’t already fall victim to all the fuss, today is both the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the origin of species. It’s even Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. (And my friend Jake Rosenberg’s birthday too!) To celebrate, I have essay in today’s Religion…
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The Self-making Man
On Religion Dispatches this morning, I’ve got a new review of Thomas Carlson’s latest book, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human. Carlson was my philosophy teacher at UC Santa Barbara—and a remarkable teacher at that. We worked harder in his graduate seminars that in any other class, and every bit was worth…
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Calling Farm Animals!
In the latest issue of the Brooklyn Rail, I’ve got an essay about this wonderful new organization co-led by my friend Aaron Gross called Farm Forward. Though they’ve already done a ton of work on a shoestring budget, just last month they officially launched at the Tribeca penthouse of Alexis Stewart, daughter of Martha. What…
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The Future of Publishing Round-up
This month I left my part-time job at The New York Times. Actually, now that I’m done, I can forget about Times style conventions and write “the New York Times” or even “the New York Times”! Very satisfying. Anyway. It was a fine place to work (particularly thanks to the cafeteria) but after a year,…
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Can Islam Save the Economy?
Today Religion Dispatches published an article that came out of my travels in the Middle East last fall. It’s about the financial and philosophical subculture of Islamic economics—the attempt to create an economic system consistent with religious law. This stuff has attracted a lot of attention lately because the very financial instruments that triggered the…
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Resources for Compassion
Last night the distinguished (and remarkably cheerful) legal philosopher Martha Nussbaum spoke in New York at the William Alanson White Institute to a crowd of graying analysts and a handful of rambunctious kids in the back from Brown’s class of ’06. Guess which I was. The title of the talk was “Compassion: Human and Animal.”…
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The Origins of Knowledge
In book XII of Metaphysics, Aristotle is on a roll. He has already figured out the causes and workings of the earthly world and, by book’s end, will have mounted the summit of God—the prime mover, for the love of whom all things move. The final step before this, however, lies with the stars. At…