They can say they buried him at sea, but they cannot say they did it according to Islam. Sea burials are permissible for Muslims in extraordinary circumstances. This is not…
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Contemporaries Essays, Extraordinary Renditions
Contemporaries Essays, Extraordinary Renditions
“We cannot conquer it — we cannot leave it alone”: Victorian Afghanistan and Its Afterlives
My father spoke English with a slight British accent, a lasting mark of the schools he attended in Kabul in the 1940s and early 1950s. He would regale us with…
Contemporaries Essays, Extraordinary Renditions
Genres in Detention
In February, a group of students and I visited the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Originally built to be used as a medium-security prison, it went unoccupied for years….
Contemporaries Essays, Extraordinary Renditions
Extraordinary Renditions
In August 2003, as the United States was ramping up the Global War on Terror, the Pentagon hosted a curious movie night for its intelligence and army personnel: Gillo Pontecorvo’s…
Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
Enrique Olvera and the Sociopolitical Aesthetics of Neoliberal Culinary Art
Chef’s Table, streaming on Netflix for six seasons so far, aspires to elevate the chef as an artist and bring the rarefied sphere of gourmets and foodies to a wider…
Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
Neoliberal Gaslighting, Quality Journalism, and Podcasting
The American Dream In the spring of 2018, ABC aired the family-oriented sitcom Alex, Inc, the story of a man who risks his family’s savings on starting a venture-funded podcasting…
Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
Playing Through a Serious Crisis: On the Neoliberal Art of Video Games
In Reality is Broken (2011), Jane McGonigal recounts a story about games that appears in the opening book of Herodotus’s ancient Greek text Histories: When Atys was king of Lydia…
Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
Human Capital After All: Business Techno, Conceptronica, and the Neoliberal Rescripting of High/Low Hierarchies
As disco, house, and techno emerged from queer communities of color in deindustrializing New York, Chicago, and Detroit, these genres of electronic dance music occupied an aesthetic status that paralleled…
Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: An Ode to the Audiobook
What we experience as audiobooks today originated in the UK in the 1920s as the talking book. Back then the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) tested different ways…
Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
The Cartoonist as Entrepreneur: Rob Liefeld, Image Comics, and the Art of the Creator-Owner
Spike Lee: Rob, have you had any formal art training? Rob Liefeld: No, just a lot of imagination. — Levi’s 501 Button Fly Commercial (1991) I. In the second episode…