November 2011
5 posts
9 tags
“An Unimaginable Pit of Emptiness:” Emerson on...
In today’s popular imagination, New England Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller are known primarily as canonical literary figures, or in Thoreau’s case as a proto-hippie recluse who lived in the woods by Walden Pond and wrote a book about it. But these writers were engaged with some of the most pressing issues of their day, from abolition and...
About Pepper Spray →
nostrich:
One hundred years ago, an American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to measure the intensity of a pepper’s burn. The scale – as you can see on the widely used chart to the left – puts sweet bell peppers at the zero mark and the blistering habenero at up to 350,000 Scoville Units.
I checked the Scoville Scale for something else yesterday. I was looking for a way to...
James Baldwin vs. John Pike
braiker:
Also, somewhat speciously, the Atlantic has this: Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike:
Here’s what [James Baldwin] had to say in the New York Times about Jim Clark, an Alabama sheriff and staunch civil rights opponent whose state troopers viciously attacked peaceful protesters.
‘[Clark] cannot be dismissed as a total monster; I am sure he loves his wife...
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October 2011
13 posts
6 tags
Police forced Columbia University students out of Hamilton Hall on May 22, 1968, ending the students’ occupation in the building. (Photo: Larry C. Morris/The New York Times).
The year is 1968.
Communist Czechoslovakia has just elected the relatively liberal Alexander Dubcek, who seeks to establish ”socialism with a human face.” During what became known as Prague Spring, Dubcek...
Occupy Word Street →
Occupy and occupation first became part of the language of protest in September 1920, when factory workers in Italy held strikes against working conditions. About 600,000 workers took control of the factories, and the movement was known in Italian as l’occupazione delle fabbriche, or “the occupation of the factories.” The earliest evidence in the Oxford English Dictionary for...
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"Who killed the Commander?" From Spain to Libya
[Posters for contemporary stagings of the play in Mexico]
What are the ethics involved in killing an oppressive leader? This is a particularly pressing issue in the Arab world today, but philosophers and writers have struggled with the question for centuries. Lope de Vega’s 1619 play Fuenteovejuna is a classic of Spanish Golden Age theatre devoted to this problem, chronicling a violent...
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An Early Occupier
In 1981 Richard Serra’s minimalist sculpture Titled Arc was installed in Foley Square and 8 years of public outrage and legal rigamarole later, the 72-ton piece was disassembled and packed away in a Brooklyn warehouse.
The General Services Administration provided the funds for this piece, and appointed the National Endowment for the Arts to select the work and the artist. They chose...
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