Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence advocates for pacifism but neglects much of the tradition’s philosophy and feminist theory. Is it possible to merge Butler’s insights with a serious concern for how nonviolent politics can be effective? Protesters blocking traffic are accused of violence; a privatized health care system that leads Black, brown, and poor people to early […]
Finland Is Rallying Around a Six-Hour Workday — And So Should We
Finland’s social-democratic prime minister, Sanna Marin, has called for a six-hour workday without loss of pay, allowing Finns more free time and a fairer distribution of employment. As the pandemic forces us to reassess how working life is organized, we should take up labor’s historic call for a shorter workday. It’s often hard to shake […]
The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful
How the domestic aesthetics of Instagram repackage QAnon for the masses When I showed some of these Instagram accounts to Sophie Bishop, a lecturer in digital humanities at King’s College London, she identified in all of them a “very recognizable,” feminine-coded aesthetic. “It’s aspirational, and then it’s also authentic enough to allow for relatability,” she […]
What pro wrestling can teach us about the quest for truth
Fans love it when backstage reality seeps into the show. But if there’s too much about backstage machinations, they switch off Plato’s Allegory of the Cave paints a vivid picture of the relationship between humans and the reality we inhabit. We are prisoners in a cave, forced to look at shadows on the wall that appear […]
Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind
The behavioral techniques that are being employed by governments and private corporations do not appeal to our reason. The term “propaganda” has been replaced by “a behavioral approach to persuasive communication with quantifiable results.” One We are living in an age in which the behavioral sciences have become inescapable. The findings of social psychology and behavioral […]