Nothing illustrates better the anti-democratic politics of austerity in Europe today than the fact that the prime ministers of both Italy and Greece have been appointed by Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, Wolfgang Schäuble, the Federal Minister of Finance, and Mario Draghi, the President of the European Central Bank.
“Imagine a world without art.” This could easily have been the message greeting visitors to the Wikipedia site on January 18, 2012, when it went silent in protest against legislation proposed in Congress (Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA). For Wikipedia and Google the issue is “free information” in the “open” Internet.
What can we learn from eighteen eighteen-year-olds about friendship? Here are some ethnographic notes I made from a freshman seminar I taught this past fall.
Does literature make us better human beings? Can poetry lead us to moral action? Do novels encourage us to be more empathetic?
Governors curtail workers’ rights. President Obama’s second term is in question. The divide between the nation’s top 1% and the rest threatens to swallow us all. It’s not easy being on the Left today.
How does the personal connect to the professional? When do we introduce the inner self to the public world and put it on display? And if we do, will we be understood, taunted, ignored? We all wrestle with these questions every day.
Two American classics, two notorious scenes, two different ends. So what happened to American masculinity in the decades between Moby Dick and “Friends?”
Why are we more excited by Facebook than by Google? I thought about this question a couple of weeks ago when the media ran stories about the rivalry between these two corporations.
The hacking and bribery scandal in the UK shows that Greece is not the only country in default.
Are we forcing the world to conform to our own image of it? Are we asking foreign authors to fashion pictures of their societies that fulfill our own perceptions, desires, and fears?
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Gregory Jusdanis teaches Modern Greek literature and culture at The Ohio State University. He is the author of The Poetics of Cavafy: Eroticism, Textuality, History (1987), Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (1991), The Necessary Nation (2001), and Fiction Agonistes: In Defense of Literature (2010), A Tremendous Thing. Friendship from the Iliad to the Internet (2014). He is currently working on a biography of C. P. Cavafy.