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Is the Former Soviet Bloc 'White'?

In the online activity many young people in North America mistake for political engagement, 'white' has become a peculiar sort of insult: a flippant meme masquerading as a serious analytic category. We...

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Yakutia

I've just completed the first lesson of L. N. Kharitonov's Self-Teaching Manual of the Yakut Language (Third Edition, Moscow, 1987). What satisfaction! At this early stage the vocabulary is very...

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Three Translations from Old High German

Wes er mit mir pflaege niemer niemenbevinde daz, wan er und ich, und ein kleinez vogellîn: tandaredei, daz mac wol getriuwe sîn. What he did to me May no one ever Know but he and I And a little bird:...

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Rachel Dolezal and the Spectre of Trans-Species Identity

I try not to weigh in on ephemeral online outrages, but there's one thing I just can't resist the urge to bring up in connection with the recent flare of fascination with Rachel Dolezal's inner life...

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Why Rachel Dolezal Still Matters After Charleston

In the first days following the news of Rachel Dolezal’s ruse, there appeared to be some real hope emerging that, at long last, the deadlock of identitarian politics might finally be over. Compelling...

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Matt Bieber's Life in the Loop: Essays on OCD

I tend towards a fairly hardcore social constructionism about most mental-health diagnoses. I've read Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking, and I'm well aware of the historicity of ways of classifying and...

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Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference

My most recent book, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2015) has been published, and is available for order both on the PUP...

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Political Animals, Continued

I was invited by Aeon Ideas to respond to the question, "Are human beings the only political animals?" Here, in part, is what I wrote in reply: In the Politics, Aristotle famously identifies human...

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The Contradictions of Capital Punishment

My new essay on the death penalty has just appeared in the Chronicle. To read the whole thing, go here. ...If Tsarnaev is killed, it will be in the name of toughness on terrorism, yet it may also...

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The Art of Moulting

[From a forthcoming essay] ... Nature’s signs, I mean, function ecdytically rather than mimetically. They work by way of identity rather than by way of representation. Our modest suggestion is that the...

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The Syrian Refugee Crisis

This is my contribution to a forum hosted earlier this week at 3 Quarks Daily. One of the memes circling around the French Internet shows the mayor of the town of Roanne telling a huddled group of...

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The Stateless Europeans

[I have a long essay on the Roma communities of Paris appearing later this year in print. The essay's focus changed radically in the middle of my research for it, in part due to editorial decisions, in...

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The Philosopher: A History in Six Types

  The fact that I have books coming out in such quick succession has more to do with the timing of my publishers than with my own work rhythms. However it came about, The Philosopher: A History in Six...

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A Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Wilhelmina Afra, Free Moorish Woman of...

Translated from the German by T.R. There are languages, barely human languages, such as English, with little or no inflection of the verb. A mere –s marks the form attached to he, she and it, while all...

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The Mendacious and Shitty 'But'

Anyone who thinks an attack on Paris is an attack on 'white people', while an attack on Beirut is an attack on people of colour, and that this is what explains the disparity in coverage by the mass...

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Friday Night in Paris

[I wrote this on request as a dispatch for an American publication, which ended up only running pieces from their staff writers. So I am posting it here, two days later.] A series of attacks occurred...

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A Few Further Remarks on my Slate Article

I published an article yesterday in Slate, analysing the possible significance of the choice of an Eagles of Death Metal concert as the site of the Daesh massacre in Paris on November 13. In it, I...

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In the Gray Zone

This is the text of the Pierre Bayle Lecture, "The Gravity of Satire: Offense and Violence after the Paris Attacks," which I delivered to the Pierre Bayle Stichting in Rotterdam on November 27, 2015....

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David Bowie (1947-2016)

How rare and remarkable. Until today I only had half as much to say about David Bowie as I do now, but that already seemed more than could ever be exhausted. He was, for one thing, my standard of male...

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The Internet of Snails

Paris, October, 1850. A young man, a former law student and radical candidate for the Constitutional Assembly by the name of Jules Allix, publishes in the feuilleton of La Presse a short article...

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