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Eyes on the Street
Perhaps Jane Jacobs’ most acclaimed contribution to urban studies in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her “eyes on the street” theory. “[T]here must be eyes upon the street, eyes...
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Halloween as Social Movement
In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Holt Paperbacks, 2007), Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the evolution of carnivals; from tribal societies masking and dancing to manufacture...
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Narrative, Performance, Selves & Solitude
Nothing is more fascinating — and frustrating to others — than our capacity to manipulate the image or story we present to others. In an acute way this capacity to pretend or impersonate raises the...
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Technology in the Age of Inequality
Last week, I attended the Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education symposium at NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication department. One panelist, NYU Sociology’s Richard Arum, addressed the...
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Privacy and Power
Two weeks ago I wrote about the relationship between privacy and power, and how may of today’s spokespeople for the oppressed focus more on stopping surveillance in the name of privacy than daring to...
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Fascism American Style: Il Duce, Il Donald
As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to...
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White Terror: Symbolic or Institutional?
Since the mass murder at Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, seven historically black churches have been torched, as have innumerable Confederate flags. Only one of these types of arson,...
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Representative Democracy is a Waste of Time
Greece is, in many ways, representative of the world right now. Its economy is floundering due to, among other things, bad loans taken out by self-interested ruling parties aided and abetted by Goldman...
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Jane Jacobs: Intuition vs. Evidence
After having read countless authors who cite Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and having intuitively come to many Jane Jacobs-esque conclusions on my own over the years, I...
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The Black Panthers: Revolutions and Dinner Parties
I recently watched Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution. While the documentary is clearly pro-Panther, I nevertheless found it to be a surprisingly critical examination of...
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