On Monday, the State Department released a 100-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism”, which blames the country for the rise of Democratic socialism and warns that it is a threat to the United States. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), who just returned from a trip to Cuba, joins Antonia Hylton with his reaction to the report.
The State Department’s new report on Cuba staples a documented Cold War history to an undocumented present, and asks the reader not to notice the seam. Its most revealing sentence is the hedge at its center — a causal claim engineered to be unfalsifiable, published at the precise moment Washington needs a predicate.
Iris Murdoch held a singular perspective on metaphors, which she frequently explored in her philosophical writings.
People often call the Presocratics the first masters of reason. That gives them too much credit and misunderstands them at the same time. Careful thinking is much older than Miletus, and modern scholars in the positivist tradition painted these mystics and cult founders to look like themselves. Yet something really did change in the Greek texts, something that survives both Aristotle’s ancient attack on Heraclitus and its modern continuation in Barnes. This essay tries to say clearly what that something was.
Walt Whitman’s “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” personifies the book as the poet himself. It intimately warns the reader that the text resists easy possession, meditating on desire, reading, and the impossibility of fully knowing another.