In 1977, Hampshire College became the first US institution of higher learning to divest from companies that did business with and helped to support apartheid South Africa. Shortly after this divestment, the college president and administration took steps to distance themselves from that...
I do not believe that a student of human reality may be ethically neutral. The sole choice we face is one between loyalty to the humiliated and to beauty, and indifference to both. It is like any other choice a moral being confronts: between taking and refusing to take responsibility for...
Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Godard’s 1966 film inspired by newspaper accounts of bourgeois women taking up prostitution for the disposable income, contains one of my favorite scenes in all his movies. In it a young boy tells his mother Juliette (Marina Vlady) about a dream...
I have always been suspicious of Swiss-born installation artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s art; it always strikes me as a little too easy. The blatant in-your-face qualities of his installations recall a petulant teenager who really wants to shake things up but can’t get out of his own way....
“I don’t know how you do it, Frank. Every time I look out at the theatre scene in this city, all I see is a lot of crap.” This statement was part of an email I received last summer while trying to decide what I would write about for an upcoming article. When I was an...
