Cioara Ionel (Oradea): Love and Utopia. Annette Ruth Appell (WUSTL): Certifying Identity (“Certifying Identity centers the birth certificate and its role in the modern state, not merely as a reporter and portable record of having been born, but also as a powerful creator, regulator, and arbiter of identity and belonging, including sex, gender, race, age, production, reproduction, and kinship”.) Your brain is over the hill by age 24: If you're older than that, you have already squandered your potential, according to Science. What if Bundy Ranch were owned by a bunch of black people? Jamelle Bouie wonders. Felix Salmon the problems of HFT, Joe Stiglitz edition. Bitcoin creator “Satoshi Nakamoto” unmasked — again? Karl Polanyi explains it all: Want to understand our market-crazed era? Rediscover the 20th century’s most prophetic critic of capitalism. Amy Merrick on the commercial allure of the Eighties. Once an enemy of Bill, David Brock is now a friend of Hillary. Washington is suffering from a naive nostalgia for old-school political bosses: Mark Schmitt on how the retiring Congressional stars show how much Washington needs free agents. If Republicans win the Senate, what crisis will Mitch McConnell cook up next? How will posterity remember Donald Rumsfeld’s most famous soundbite? That's a known unknown. This is the era of the rule of thanaticism: the mode of production of non-life. Alexander Huls on 10 dystopias we might actually want to live in.
