Philosophy as a Way of Life

  • Neoliberalism promotes addiction

    We live in a sociocultural situation that maximizes alienation at every turn. It’s the reason that even when most folx are “celebrating” in social spaces like bars, they mostly experience “being together alone.” This is why I have come to… Continue reading

    Neoliberalism promotes addiction
  • Queering and Wyrding

    ‘Q’ then, will never be a coherent letter tacked as a bridge on some list of identities. The past decade shows the poverty or ruin of every attempt to do so. We’ve said already that these words are magic. We… Continue reading

    Queering and Wyrding
  • The Hierophant: There is more-so than the just-so

    The most intriguing nuances of experience cannot be wholly captured by words. Positive claims within consciousness-as-such can only apprehend so-much of our being-world as an encompassing phenomenon (Jaspers 1970b: 18-22). We have known this since the very beginning of recorded… Continue reading

    The Hierophant: There is more-so than the just-so
  • A long tradition… Black Women leading a charge for justice with little or no help

    Why has it taken more than 20 years and testimony by about 50 accusers to get to this moment [R. Kelly finally charged for all of his sexual abuses]? Because we live in a country where a history of racism… Continue reading

    A long tradition… Black Women leading a charge for justice with little or no help
  • Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider | Books | The Guardian

    Identity politics finds critics everywhere. Throw a rock at a rack of newspapers and you’ll probably hit an editorial condemning it. Conservatives such as Republican House speaker Paul Ryan blame it for polarisation, while liberals like the Columbia University historian… Continue reading

    Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider | Books | The Guardian
  • ‘One of a kind’ Egyptian tomb discovery revealed

    The tomb, found in the Saqqara pyramid complex near Cairo, is filled with colourful hieroglyphs and statues of pharaohs. Decorative scenes show the owner, a royal priest named Wahtye, with his mother, wife and other relatives. Archaeologists will start excavating… Continue reading

    ‘One of a kind’ Egyptian tomb discovery revealed
  • Escape From the Trump Cult

    Millions of Americans are blindly devoted to their Dear Leader. What will it take for them to snap out of it? …manipulating the media, Trump tore pages from the us-against-them playbook of the European far right and presented them to… Continue reading

    Escape From the Trump Cult
  • The “Yellow Vests” Show How Much the Ground Moves Under Our Feet

    About the only class of people who seem unable to grasp this new reality are intellectuals. Just as during Nuit Debout, many of the movement’s self-appointed “leadership” seemed unable or unwilling to accept the idea that horizontal forms of organization… Continue reading

    The “Yellow Vests” Show How Much the Ground Moves Under Our Feet
  • Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche

    Wow. Cyber capitalism fetishized to the point of apotheosis. It’s only my first day, but it’s clear this is not the Burning Man-style celebration of the liberatory potential of decentralization I was promised. This is a locked-room, hard-sell pitch session… Continue reading

    Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche
  • American Geographic Polarization

    Research shows that partisans aren’t purposefully walling themselves off. There is no intentional Big Sort. Such geographic polarization—where supporters of one or the other party cluster together in homogeneous enclaves, producing localities with lopsided distributions of political preferences—has been growing… Continue reading

  • Nuclear Pasta: Strongest Material in Universe Discovered in Neutron Star Crust

    The strongest material in the universe has been discovered: nuclear pasta from neutron stars. The material is so intense it could never exist on Earth—if somehow a tiny amount were transported here, it would explode like a nuclear bomb. Instead… Continue reading

  • We need to understand that disaster is slow

    Defining a disaster as an “event” has a history extending to the 1960s, when federal funds were spent to model the social impact of a nuclear attack. To do this, Civil Defense officials commissioned studies of proxies of an attack,… Continue reading

  • This Changes Everything | Vanity Fair

    Hollywood’s most powerful women appear in the Geena Davis-produced documentary This Changes Everything, which draws a direct line between the president and the industry’s sea change. — Read on www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/09/this-changes-everything-toronto-film-festival-documentary-weinstein-trump-me-too “Hours after This Changes Everything concluded to a standing ovation,… Continue reading

  • The neuroscience of nostalgia | Al Jazeera America

    The term “nostalgia” was coined in the late 17th century by a Swiss physician named Johannes Hofer. He used the roots of two Greek words, “nostos” and “algos” — meaning “suffering” and “origins” — to describe what he thought was… Continue reading

  • Greek Natural Philosophy

    The first edition of the text on Presocratic philosophy which I co-authored with J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren is now available for adoption from Cognella. Greek Natural Philosophy presents the primary sources on the Presocratics in a straightforward… Continue reading

  • Max Liboiron at #AnthropocenePHL

    The opening keynote at the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia was Prof. Max Liboiron: How We Do Science on Permanent Plastic Pollution. Max Liboiron is a feminist environmental scientist, science and technology studies (STS) scholar, and activist. As an Assistant Professor in Geography… Continue reading

  • Socrates in the Anthropocene

    I want to thank Scott Knowles for encouraging me to leave my little town of Denton, Texas, and come up here for the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia at Drexel University. A word of warning as I follow up my colleagues on the roving… Continue reading

    Socrates in the Anthropocene
  • Forget Coates vs. West — We All Have a Duty to Confront the Full Reach of U.S. Empire

    Even when our work is primarily focused nationally or hyperlocally, as it is for most organizers and writers, there is still a pressing need for an internationalist conception of power to inform our analysis. This is not a contradiction. In… Continue reading