winter2017

The business of relationships Has there ever been a society as obsessed as modern English-speaking Western societies are by “relationships,” “love,” and “families” as conventionally defined?

Having recently finished a PhD in American cultural and intellectual history, there is one question I’ve heard often enough to wish I had another dissertation to write: “what next?”

David Ellerman, philosopher, mathematician, economist, and political theorist, is highly critical of the intellectual underpinnings of the current employment system, which he says institutionalize “the renting of persons” on dubious philosophical grounds.

In her recent book, Greening Death—Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth, writer, farmer, and feminist scholar Suzanne Kelly looks at the development of a grassroots movement that has been leading people towards more sustainable burial practices.

Robert Hawkins is Assistant Dean and Director of the Undergraduate Program at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work, where he also serves as McSilver Associate Professor in Poverty Studies.

When political economist and social reformer Henry George died in 1897, his funeral was attended by thousands who proceeded from Grand Central Palace in Manhattan to Brooklyn City Hall on their way to Green-Wood Cemetery, his final resting place.

When asked what her dreams are, Star (Sasha Lane), the displaced, teenage protagonist of Andrea Arnold’s 2016 feature, American Honey, tells a sympathetic trucker that she wants to get her own place—a trailer where she can raise a family. Always just out of reach, the imagined home propels her forward as she travels between towns selling magazine subscriptions, at one point accepting cash in exchange for a sexual encounter with an oil worker. Set on the open road, the film repeatedly depicts the homes of Star’s potential customers—lavish mansions whose inhabitants thoughtlessly discard jewelry amongst piles of presents or happily offer cash to watch the spunky teenager drink tequila. Honey is Arnold’s inaugural portrait of American culture, a bold, dreamy declaration that, regardless