Debates

The word ‘teledildonics’ has been around at least since 1990. And it remains current, even if the phenomenon it names is sometimes also called sex with robots. The theme was …
Read More

AMAZONIAN POEMS

Table

The table often dreams of having been an animal.

But if it had been an animal, it would not be a table.

If it had …
Read More

The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer has defined man as an animal symbolicum. For, unique among living beings, “he has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical …
Read More

The price of admission is $20, but my mouse hovers over the Check Out button with a tinge of trepidation. My reluctance? To give money to an institution that forces …
Read More

Four days prior to the US presidential elections, I read Trump’s The Art of the Deal—a manual for con artists and, as it turned out, an updated version of Machiavelli’s …
Read More

I do not believe that I am exaggerating if I say that we are living in exasperated societies. For reasons that are clear in some instances and less reasonable in …
Read More

It’s now a fairly well-trodden argument that democracy is dead – or at least that it ought to be. So many atrocities have been committed in the name of democracy …
Read More

I don’t need to tell anyone reading this how technology, ease of movement, and relative wealth have opened up myriad ways for us to spend or waste our time; or …
Read More

The controversial Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has inspired debate ever since it was handed down.  The court held that corporations have the same political …
Read More

The United States has gone mad—a land of extravagant wealth, and now a land of extravagant vulgarity. Trump is the end of democracy, the final sign of a declining superpower …
Read More