November 2011

As the Balinese Monkey Chant beautifully demonstrates, timing is everything. Without timing, we not only lose the ability to dance and make music, but we even impair our ability to speak. The human microphone had its moment — but it was brief. Once it passed from being an ingenious adaptation to a prohibition on the [...]

At Open Democracy, Todd Gitlin writes: Since Sept. 17, there have been so many moving parts in the evolving ensemble known as Occupy, each rubbing against the others in a whole ecology of protest, that predictions are foolhardy. But there’s a good chance that the great sprawling hard-to-pin-down Occupy movement is well along in the [...]

Jonathan Jones writes: Every nascent political movement needs martyrs. Even the sensible British labour movement, whose history is mostly peaceful and overwhelmingly parliamentary, has its memories of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Peterloo massacre. Revolutionary traditions fervently venerate their political saints: Irish republicanism has an especially rich pantheon from Pearse and Connolly to Bobby Sands. [...]