Apocalypse Now? The Evolution of Trump’s Policies Towards Iran
In a March 30, 2025, telephone interview with Kristen Welker of NBC News, U.S. President Donald Trump stated: “If they [the Iranians] don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen.” This vitriolic statement was reflective of Donald Trump’s desire to remake the Persian…
Read MoreA Termite’s Guide to Undermining SNAP
Conservatives long have had it in for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.[1] Ronald Reagan hated it so much that he refused to reverse severe program cuts even when faced with mounting hunger amidst a deep recession, choosing instead to send surplus “government cheese” to states to distribute to the…
Read MoreThe Government Attack on Public Health Research
I have been conducting transdisciplinary research on HIV/AIDS, COVID, overdose, and related topics for over forty years. In my HIV research, I have had to try to understand a virus that, without intervention, destroys its host human body within about ten years—which might look like a recipe for a viral disease’s self-destruction. Underlying this, however,…
Read MoreAmerican Higher Education in the Era of Trump
Introduction: The Faustian Bargain Higher education in America long ago sold its soul to corporate America. Whether through its heavy dependence on corporate funding for business schools and scientific research, the rebranding of students as “customers,” the evisceration of tenure to promote flexibility in hiring, or the adoption of top-down, management-heavy infrastructures, universities have steadily…
Read MoreMamdani, a “New Municipalism”, and the Undertow of Party Elites
The fight is on for the future of cities and with it the future of democracy in the country. The Trump administration’s ham-fisted deployment of federal troops and the National Guard to usurp local policing and bolster ICE roundups of “immigrant-looking” residents is being challenged by mayors and governors and by citizens outraged by the…
Read MoreA Socialist Mayor for New York? What History Suggests
In the spring of 1910 newspapers around the country speculated about what was going to happen in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as the result of the election of a Socialist mayor in that city. The mayor, Emil Seidel, tried to calm the fears of those who predicted a dangerous revolution was about to take place. Still, after…
Read MoreReflections on Shelley’s The Cenci: Transgression, Exorcism, Sacrifice
The true difference between Byron and Shelley consists in this, that those who understand and love them consider it fortunate that Byron died in his thirty-sixth year, for he would have become a reactionary bourgeoise had he lived longer; conversely, they regret Shelley’s death at the age of twenty-nine, because he was a revolutionary through…
Read MoreThe Metonymy of Light: Three Early Works by Stan Brakhage
At the heart of preeminent American avant-gardist Stan Brakhage’s cinema, there lies a central tension or struggle between abstraction and representation. Film critic and Brakhage chronicler Fred Camper has posited The Riddle of Lumen (1972) as a kind of central work in this regard, arguing for that film as a turning point in Brakhage’s work…
Read MoreOn Michael J. Thompson’s Twilight of the Self
Michael J. Thompson’s Twilight of the Self is a highly sophisticated theoretical analysis of the present day, deeply informed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Thompson reawakens the antecedents and the legacies of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and updates them for the twenty-first century. The book demands much…
Read MoreDomination, Weirdness, and Art: On Michael Thompson’s Twilight of the Self
Introduction: The Problem of the Cybernetic Society Michael Thompson, over the past ten or so years, has created a considerable corpus of significant work which has established him as a leading next generation critical theorist. In The Domestication of Critical Theory, Thompson offers a critique of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth for abandoning a Marxist…
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