Debates

DAVID BOWIE, whose death on January 10 came as a shock to millions of his fans around the world, had a profound impact on generations of listeners. Beyond the appreciation …
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Spoiler alert, in a sense

In the newest installment of Star Wars, “The Force Awakens,” I was struck by a minor detail that recurred throughout the film: the awkward aeronautics …
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ONE ATTRIBUTE of this year’s presidential contest that has not gone unnoticed by the press is the apparent insouciance with which the candidates have gone about embellishing their records, denying the …
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In memory of Alan Rickman (21 February 1946 – 14 January 2016)

ALAN RICKMAN gives us J. K. Rowling’s Professor Severus Snape as we know and loathe him. Setting aside the …
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WAS PRIVACY — as an idea and a reality — only a brief interlude, available to a few prosperous, modern Westerners? They could afford rooms of their own where they might …
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AS THE GLOBAL CONFERENCE on climate change is taking place in Paris, it is time to contemplate the meaning of “clean energy.” In the West, the word energy is marked …
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THE CITY OF PARIS, the host of the upcoming Conference of Parties (COP21) whose objective is to slow down global warming, is quite a good illustration of the theme of …
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SOME 10 YEARS AGO, in an article that now makes me cringe (please don’t look it up!), I discussed a short text by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben titled “Beyond …
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IDIOMS beginning “the politics of…” are often used to describe a dimension of other activities that is thought to be less than essential to them. “The politics of the university,” …
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ONE WAY we might think about the present is by way of an all too natural epidemic of hunger confusion. Here is what we are so often told by those experts …
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