Dieser Text ist eine Übersetzung aus dem Amerikanischen von Aaron Badys Beitrag zu Wikileaks vom 29. November 2010. Weitere Analysen zu Wikileaks finden sich in seinem Blog.
I am a New York City-based social researcher. I write about social theory, religion, politics, culture, books, Europe, facial hair, and other things that catch my interest.
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Julian Assange und die Computerverschwörung: “diese unsichtbare Regierung zu Fall zu bringen”
'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die'
Umberto Eco on lists, self and society.
“Americans who want to emphasize that ‘politics isn’t all there is to life’ are people who don’t feel very keenly the sting of injustice or the anxiety of uncertainty or the horror of what this country does in our name. When you lose your job because of politics, or can’t afford to go to school because of politics, or are denied full citizenship because of politics, or die because of politics, the idea that ‘politics isn’t all there is to life’ will be cold comfort to you.”
I really just wanted to teach myself a bit more about typesetting, but I ended up creating an entire book with a cover, an index, and fleurons! I set the text of Georg Simmel’s Lebensanschauung, originally published in 1918 and digitalized by socio.ch (Simmel’s work entered the public domain seventy years after his death), and think it didn’t turn out too badly. Check it out!
Gabriel García Márquez with a black eye after being punched in the face by Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010 Nobel Laureate in Literature, in 1976.
Discovering Stead
On a recent vacation, I did some long-overdue beach reading (critics of beach reading be damned), the major upshot of which was that I read Christina Stead’s wonderful novel The Man Who Loved Children. I am grateful for the haunting power and beauty of her prose and that, by mere serendipity, I became aware of the book’s existence after seeing a reference to its author in an article I read for work-related reasons. Only later did I find out that no lesser authority than Jonathan Franzen, author of the much-hyped Freedom, recently recommended this work for summer reading. This apparently helped the relatively obscure book to gain a higher profile this year, the seventieth anniversary of its original publication in 1940. For that, Franzen is no doubt to be thanked.
