Agamben: Homo Sacer I, Bare Life & Biopolitics
Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer I: bare life, homo sacer, biopolitics after Foucault, inclusive exclusion, sovereignty, and the camp as paradigm of...
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Jackson: The Determination of Union
H. W. Brands’ Andrew Jackson biography: Scots-Irish frontier ethos, New Orleans, the presidency, Indian removal, and Jackson as blunt democratic...
La Boétie: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (English)
English translation of Étienne de La Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire—tyranny, popular consent, and why collective refusal would...
The Lead Age: Climate Studies of Late Antiquity
From Paul Stephenson’s New Rome: Roman Climate Optimum, Greenland ice-core lead, metallurgy, diet, and how lead pollution and climate shift...
Weber: Science and Politics as Vocation
Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation” in the NYRB edition: Beruf, disenchantment, charisma, academic careerism, and the...
The Origins of Western Law: Early Greek Jurisprudence
Michael Gagarin’s Early Greek Law: how classical Greek legal procedure grew with literacy, oral vs written norms, and what “law” meant before and...
Omegarus: Grainville's Last Man and Dying Earth
Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le dernier homme (1805): genealogy of dying-Earth SF from Omegarus through Hodgson, Wells, and Jack Vance’s...
The Easter Controversy (x3)
The fascinating history of bitter disputes over Easter's date that shaped church politics, from Jewish Passover origins to medieval calendar wars
The quintessence of dust
Reflections on humanity's paradoxical nature as both noble and wretched, exploring the tension between our divine aspirations and earthly limitations
Calendratics: debt and time
A quick reflection on the Roman and Christian implications of the calendar