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The Radicalism of Abolitionist Radicals

February 16, 2016 - By Bruce Laurie

(Remarks originally delivered as part of a panel celebrating the publication of Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, Yale University Press, 2016.)

I was not surprised to hear UMass Provost Katherine Newman, in her opening remarks for this book launch, recall the days when historians told us that abolitionists were well-intentioned but feckless bourgeois reformers. It put me in mind of an earlier school of thought, dominant in the 1950s, that looked askance at popular movements of...

Favorite Things: Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring

February 7, 2016 - By Nicole Duffy Robertson

When Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes presented The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on May 29, 1913, an unsuspecting Belle Époque audience was shocked. The premiere of Sacre is the stuff of legend, with audiences hissing and screaming obscenities, and the dancers stunned and unable to hear Igor Stravinsky’s music, prompting choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky to run from the house to the wings, yelling the counts for them to be able to continue the dance. The controversial ballet was performed only nine times (including the dress rehearsal) and then dropped from the repertory for most of the twentieth...

Borders are the New Black

February 1, 2016 - By Pedja Jurišić

In 2015, more than one million refugees and migrants made the perilous trip to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. In October alone, to beat the onset of winter and closing European borders, their number rose to nearly a quarter million, a record, and more than the total for all of 2014, as per UNHCR figures. No coherent European policy has emerged to deal with the crisis and there is little hope that one will develop. To fill this void, nations have mostly sought to ensure that the refugees are someone else's problem, providing safe passage north, to Germany and Sweden, or barring entrance entirely. No land, it seems, wants to be the last to shut its doors.

The immigrants’ religious and cultural background, as well as their sheer number, are said to be...

The Work of Art in an Age of Digital Reproduction

January 28, 2016 - By Una Tanović

The artist Anur Hadžiomerspahić has 5000 friends. He’d like to have more, but Facebook caps the number at five thousand. It’s a generous allowance, considering studies in evolutionary psychology have demonstrated that human beings, like our primate ancestors, can only maintain approximately 150 complex social connections at any given time. Facebook, of course, isn’t overly concerned with evolutionary psychology; the company cites “back-end technology” as a reason for the limit. And yet the social network and the parameters of its algorithm do shape how its users think about the...

Amy Leach Reads Her "Safari"

January 15, 2016 - By Mass Review