Sam Dresser

Politics, especially in the United States, is emotional. The person that can speak stirringly to the electorate’s heartstrings, that can move voters by force of personality and words, that can make people feel as if they themselves are taking charge at a dramatic turning point of history - this is the person that will be imbued with power. It matters less that a would-be leader knows the policy details or grasps the niceties of economic theory than to connect emotionally. When political decisions were made by ostentatiously disinterested aristocrats, the emotional factor mattered less (Jefferson made all of two public speeches during his eight years in office). But now that the everyman i...

Solitary confinement is clearly cruel and unusual. The evidence shows that it is physically and psychologically devastating to the point that rehabilitation becomes impossible. It is and has been used as torture - and called by that name too. It is meant to annihilate a person. The argument for this is settled.

But that hasn’t kept it from being used. Why? The reason is that there is a fundamental disagreement about what the purpose of prison is. As the Scandinavians - and particularly the Norwegians - well-attest, prison can be made to rehabilitate inmates so that they can once again become functioning members of society. Meanwhile in America, and many other parts of the world, th...

Games that are truly in bad taste, that go beyond the pale as this Hatred game seems to do (I watched some videos of the gameplay and, not to sound Puritan, I was not in favor), seem to be genuinely shunned, if not by hardcore gamers than by the middling majority on which a lot of sales depend. Games that can be morally questionable, like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, are successful because they’re fun to play and they’re fun to play because they push the envelope in terms of authenticity and immersion. There are tasteless things about these games, but the games aren’t founded upon moral nihilism – it’s more that these games are attempting to construct a version and vision of ‘real l...

Yes, I agree with Peter, specifically that language - words - can enhance my understanding of music while never really capturing what it means to me. For instance, understanding, however partially, what complexity is involved in the fashioning of a fugue can make that of music far more beautiful because you can hear the voices interact in a new and deeper way. Perhaps this is akin to knowing the context of a work: Contrapunctus XIV may be moving in its own right, but it becomes all the more so when you know that Bach died writing it.

This all raises a more general question o...

Very interesting, provocative piece!

In non-arranged marriages partners can choose not only who they like (given that affections are reciprocated) but they can choose *how* they go about choosing. This seems to me a crucial point. The dating app industry is supremely weird in a variety of (often hilarious) ways, and I’ve got some excellent first hand data to back up the assertion. But it is first and foremost a choice to engage in it - plenty of people get on just fine without Tinder, of course, and do find love in Badiou’s sense of necessary spotanaity (if that isn’t too much of a contradiction). I just fail to see a qualitative difference, from a retrospective point of view, in w...

As a practical matter, I quite agree with Corey Robin’s solution to the Princeton conflict, which ties in nicely here. Rename the school - he suggests WEB Du Bois - and post a sign in front of the building that simply says “In 2015 the students and faculty voted to name this the WEB Du Bois School of Public and International Affairs. Until then it was named the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in honor of the 28th President.” Then it’s not so much that history is being ‘whitewashed’ as it is history being history. Our ‘moving on’ from Wilson is an acknowledgement of Wilson’s racism, yes, but more importantly renaming the building enshrines this historical moment f...

Obviously, this one is a no-brainer: the giant lemur. Being able to bring back slovenly lemurs the size of gorillas seems to me like a win-win.

Here’s how one French colonial governor described it:

An animal as big as a two-year-old calf, with a round head and a human face: the front feet are monkeylike, and the rear ones as well. It has frizzy hair, a short tail, and humanlike ears. … One has been seen near Lake Lipomami, around which it lives. It is a very solitary animal; the local people fear it greatly and flee from it as it does from them.

Who wouldn’t want to look outside and see READ MORE→ See comment