Social Science

The future of Islamism

Tarek Osman— Arab Islamism has always tried to design the future in the image of the past. The Islamists have repeatedly tried to impose their own interpretations of certain episodes in Islamic history upon how their societies should live in the present. The approach might have had some merit when

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Sense of righteousness

Robert A. Burt— The judicial task is not mechanistic but properly and necessarily involves judgment. In particular, judges must understand themselves as ultimately promoting equal deliberation among conflicting parties rather than imposing their own calculus of equality on the parties. This understanding is not alien to the judicial function; it

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Has ISIS Won the Digital War?

Philippe Joseph-Salazar— First, let us remember that terrifying images of throat-slitting are not new. The atrocity of which our discourse community is (not) aware is more than a decade old: It did not begin with the execution of the American journalist James Foley, beheaded on prime time in August 2014.

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Ep. 36 – The Challenges of Being a Social Media Star

The road to social media stardom is difficult and rarely pays well. Brooke Erin Duffy shares stories of success and offers advice and a warning for those looking to make it big.

Ep. 4 – The Nazi Mind

Psychiatrist Joel Dimsdale discusses the pathology of Nazi war criminals.

Jenny Diski: On Babyface

Jenny Diski— The great advantage over real live creatures that my Three Bears had in common with Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, aside from not needing to be fed or produce droppings, was neoteny. Mickey and my ursine family looked only glancingly like a mouse or brown bears, and much more like babies.

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Writing and Self-Hatred

Devorah Baum— In his amazingly pleasurable new book, In Writing, psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips describes writing, in his experience, as an “amazing pleasure.” Lucky him. He sits down to write, he says, and the writing just happens—he’s never “trying” to write and meeting some sort of internal resistance or

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Sorkin on the Racing Line

Clive James— Both The Sopranos and Band of Brothers were HBO cable productions, and their collective impact might tend to persuade us that network television was left nowhere. But it’s a law of the arts that a stylistic innovation gets instantly everywhere, like heat or cold; and in fact, even while HBO

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Net Neutrality and The Internet of Things

Philip N. Howard— The internet of things will help bring structure to global politics, but we must work for a structure we want. This is a challenging project, but if we don’t take it on our political lives will become fully structured by algorithms we don’t understand, data flows we

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Pride Month Bookshelf: LGBTQIA+ History, Cultural Studies, and Literature Beyond June

Presenting our Yale University Press Pride Month reading list—because celebrating #Pride2017, learning from the history of the movement, championing stories and contributions of LGBTQIA+ individuals, and working each day to insist on equal and fair treatment of queer communities should extend far beyond June. Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World by Gregory

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