Thinking the Present

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex – Shane Harris

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Most frustrating is the author’s futile attempt to reconcile his desire for a broad readership with his choice of a subject as inherently technical as cyber warfare.

Amitava Kumar

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Style, whether in fiction or nonfiction, is always, always, always, the curry in which the goat gets cooked.

David Blacker

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Maybe we are fucked, it’s completely possible. Maybe there are structures that are more powerful than individual agency, or even collective agency to overcome in certain situations.

Chris Andrews

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I read Bolaño first as a general reader, then as a translator, and finally as a critic.

Simon Critchley

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Bowie . . . is the most important artist of the last forty years, for me, in any medium — any medium, books, anything.

Robert Meister – pt. 2

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In California belief in the goodness of our state universities is best understood as a civic religion, which makes it difficult when faculty like me and Chris Newfield try to tell the public that its universities have become worse

Robert Meister – pt. 1

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In colloquial terms we say possession is nine tenths of the law — well the other tenth is reparations.

Paul Holdengräber

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What we hide and what we try to obfuscate, what we avoid, the ways in which we deceive others and deceive ourselves — all this is so much a part of who we are.

Notes on Not Passing

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I’m El Salvadoran to an Oaxacan, mulatto to a Haitian squinting her eyes, black to the negro curious about America’s slave past, and white to any Anglo too busy finding what they want to see there. Either I am nobody, or I am a nation.

Women Who Make A Fuss – Isabelle Stengers & Vinciane Despret

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What is the value of walking soberly and honorably to the guillotine? Why not cry and scream all the way there?