Essays

Samuel Chase, Forgotten Jurist

Samuel Chase, Forgotten Jurist

Samuel Chase, is perhaps, the judge least deserving of being pushed to the wayside. An unlikely hero, his jurisprudence reveals a strong conviction that the legal order has higher grounding than the procedures by which it was adopted.
Leo Thuman
Essays Politics Law
Sonic Futurism

Sonic Futurism

Pop music is everywhere. As capital’s sonic handmaiden, pop obliterates particularist traditions, cordoning off their pasts and futures. Different cultures produce their own pop, but the gaudy sets, aesthetic palettes, sexual magnetism, and rhythmic hypnotics are all the same.
Benjamin Roberts
Essays Culture Music
Plato at a Glance

Plato at a Glance

Plato thought it appropriate to put his name on the *Cleitophon*, a dialogue so unsettlingly short that it encourages his readers to take him in at a glance, just as its titular character seems to have given Socrates no less superficial treatment.
Alex Priou
Essays Society Philosophy
The COVID Dispensation

The COVID Dispensation

Young Americans entering the labor force could not have done so at a worse time. Even discounting the scourge of COVID-19, the American project, once known for innovation and leadership, has resigned itself to accepting an imperfect world. During a national and global crisis, we have lost our way.
Spike Dearing
Essays Society Community
Theater of Cruelty

Theater of Cruelty

Mass society is able to abstract and mysticize the costs of pain. In a sense, deathmatch wrestling inverts this paradigm. Rather than being civilised barbarity it is barbarically civilised. The appearance of primal, sadistic aggression obscures efforts not to cause long-term injury and death.
Ben Sixsmith
Essays Culture