Tag: millenialism
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From Occupation to Reconstruction
Ever since I wrote a book about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve often found myself being asked, “What happened to Occupy, anyway?” Now, more than two years since the movement faded from the headlines and in the wake of French economist Thomas Piketty’s best-selling diagnosis of economic inequality, the urgency of the question is mounting, not…
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Code Your Own Utopia
My latest at Al Jazeera, on Bitcoin’s most ambitious successor, Ethereum. This may or may not be the future, but for now it’s the hype: Even the most flexible platform comes with certain built-in tendencies. Ethereum, for example, makes it easier to build organizations that are less centralized and less dependent on geography than traditional…
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The Official Guide to Thank You, Anarchy
Maybe you saw a scene from it on HBO’s The Newsroom. Or perhaps you annotated part of it on RapGenius. Some of you may have even glimpsed the foreword by Rebecca Solnit, in which she wrote: Thanks to this meticulous and elegant book, we know what one witness-participant was thinking all through the first year…
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Some Great Cause, God’s New Messiah
Early this past summer, I came across a certain quotation opening an essay by Mary Elizabeth King—now a columnist for Waging Nonviolence and a friend. This was right about the time I first got the idea in my head that I needed to learn how to tell the stories of how great resistance movements are…
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The Suspicious Revolution
What does it do to people, and to a society, to suddenly become revolutionary? I recently had the chance to speak with Talal Asad, one of the leading anthropologists alive today, about the experience of being in Cairo earlier this year as the revolution unfolded around him. Our conversation appears this week at The Immanent…
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An Eden Full of Dudes
The end is the beginning is the end (that’s a Smashing Pumpkins line), and all are in Eden. Today at Religion Dispatches, Brook Wilensky-Lanford and I talk about her brand new book, Paradise Lust, out this week. It tells the stories of some bold explorers from the past few centuries who have tried to figure…
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Lull Me Into Rapture
Today at The Daily, the new tablet-only newspaper-ish publication, I have a short essay on the latest forthcoming apocalypse: About a decade ago, during a period of late-adolescent, almost apocalyptic urgency, with a sudden conversion to Roman Catholicism only a short time away, I discovered an unusual way to relax. At home, in my basement…
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The Memory Theater, Revisited
Late last year, I published the sketch of an essay here called “Don’t Take Away My Memory Theater.” The feedback that came in the comments from you readers was enough to encourage me to try developing the ideas in it even more. Now, finally, a much-extended version has been published by the good people at…
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Don’t Take Away My Memory Theater
What concerns me about the coming literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the full or partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves but the assortments in which they find themselves. Specifically, I am concerned about what’s going to happen to my own library. For public and academic libraries,…