by Brendan Roach

Eric Hobsbawm, In Memoriam

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Through Stalin’s purges, the tanks in Budapest, the Great Leap Forward, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eric Hobsbawm remained unshakeable in his belief of Marxism’s emancipatory potential.

A Labor Dispute

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No less prominent a fan than Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker — the scourge of Midwestern labor — weighed in on the side of the referees’ union. As it turns out, reflexive labor-bashing can have adverse effects. Who knew!

A Memorial in Washington

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That Washington is a city riven by stark divisions — of class, of race, of opportunity — is a fact sadly beyond dispute. Yet the recent AIDS conference did draw attention to one of the city’s most troubling fault lines — the deadly geography of HIV/AIDS.

The Dark and the Sublime

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Every act of censorship is a tacit admission that the artistic sublime is a double-edged sword.

Marx’s Credit Card

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In Germany, history follows different rules: Even the losers are allowed to write their names in the book.

The Space Between Spaces

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The issue of sentence spacing, like all typographical conventions, is a victim of circumstance, and partisans on both sides tend to trace their allegiance back to different writing technologies.

Elegy for a Census Form

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In a neoliberal America, even information-gathering has been outsourced to private enterprise.

Pussy Riot and the Patriarch

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In the most liberal city in Russia, a crowd approaching the capacity of Luzhniki Stadium amassed in favor of jailing blasphemers.

Günter Grass and the Perils of Political Poetry

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Grass’s poem reads like an Intro to IR lecture given in haiku.

The Ads of the D.C. Metro

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A quick glance at the public advertising in Metro stations and bus shelters around Washington, DC will tell you more about America and her capital than any memorial, monument, or museum.