by claratimsit
Abiding by the containment requirements is a class privilege. The most insecure do not have the luxury of telecommuting or sitting on their wages for a few months. And death has always been part of everyday life—it is in the night, it is in the streets, it is in hunger, it is in power, it is in fathers and husbands.
Categories: Comment • Tags: capitalism, death, disease, medicine, mexico, poverty, social class
Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray I Robert Smithson’s Mirrors and Shelly Sand (images above) is a long, low, floor-lying crest of sand (approximately 30 feet by 5 feet), which is divided in equal parts by 50 double-sided mirrors.[1] Division and reflection—reflection in the sense of light, images, and ideas being thrown back without being absorbed—are central concepts here. As regards division, […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: art, beauty, capitalism, cultural criticism, intellectuals, Oscar Wilde
by fritztucker
I’m not the only person who finds 50 Cent a fascinating figure. His landmark album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, is one of the top ten best selling albums in rap history, and is perhaps the only rap album ever to have a feature film made of it. While living in Belize during the summer of 2005, I stumbled upon a middle-schooler’s yearbook in a house I was doing construction on. Nearly every child’s yearbook quote was either a line from Get Rich or Die […]
Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: art, capitalism, politics
by Ed Mooney
I have no complaints about living in Maine. I find good music, good restaurants, good friends in the small city of Portland. I’ve taught inland and upstate in Bangor – just this side of Old Town, home of the classic canvas canoes I grew up with and rigged for sailing in a tidal river that opens on Buzzards Bay. That inlet-laced coast reminds me of the Maine Coast. There’s an older, slower, pace to life here. All this nostalgia […]
Categories: Ed Mooney, Uncategorized, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, education, literature, reading, technology, writing
by fritztucker
Two weeks ago I wrote about the relationship between privacy and power, and how may of today’s spokespeople for the oppressed focus more on stopping surveillance in the name of privacy than daring to call for surveillance of oppressors, or imagine ways that surveillance could be used to create a world devoid of oppression. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about our current obsession with privacy. In The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, […]
Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: books, capitalism, civil rights, crime, criminals, ethics, literature, New York City, philosophy, politics, reading, social justice, technology, women, writing
Many people in Europe believe without saying, or say without believing, that one of the great advantages of universal suffrage is that it calls men worthy of the people’s confidence to take charge of public affairs. The people do not know how to govern themselves, but, it is said, they always want the State to thrive, and they but rarely fail to choose for leaders people who both share this desire and are the most fit to wield political power. […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, corruption, de Tocqueville, democracy, Donald Trump, New York Times, Presidential campaigns, Socrates, United States of America, Yeats
by fritztucker
Last week, I attended the Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education symposium at NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication department. One panelist, NYU Sociology’s Richard Arum, addressed the impact of technology on education-as-vocation—a subject on which I recommend Sugata Mitra’s self-organized, child-driven pedagogy. The other panelists focused primarily on digital technology’s impact on educational administration. Debates arose around the development of online-only curricula, apps that send parents reports on how late their children arrive to class, and the ethical implications […]
Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, civil rights, crime, death, education, ethics, History, New York City, politics, science, social justice, technology
A.k.a., Littlering There is a strain of environmental thinking that proposes (with more than a little sense) that we need to learn how to do more with less. Or perhaps we need (yet again?) to discover how less is more. Fewer human beings always seems like a good place to start. There is of course the problem that biggering (as Dr. Seuss called it) has come to seem essential to our economic “growth” and “health,” and to the health […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: airplanes, Bob Dylan, capitalism, climate change, economic crisis, England, environmentalism, global warming, technology
A follow-up to a previous discussion of how experts, and the media that aids and abets them, and the class interests that pay these experts’ salaries—they’re in the mask-making business. A January 26 New York Times story reported that “according to an independent analysis” the proposed trade pact between North American countries, the United States in particular, and Pacific rim nations “would increase incomes, exports and growth in the United States . . . and would not cost overall […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: academia, Barack Obama, capitalism, class warfare, corporations, journalism, New York Times, Paul Krugman, trade pact, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
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