Faculty Writing: Escape from Paradise
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rebecca Ariel Porte, mourning the death of Ursula Le Guin, writes that we needn’t mourn—or, at least, preserve in amber memories of the dead and some state of past perfection. Rather, to achieve the actual object of mourning, “the freedom of the living and the dead,” we must resist any temptation to reconstruct an imagined, changeless “Golden Age,” and instead embrace our “fortunate fall” into a world of change and chaos—”for it’s in the ostracism that possibility, a spirit and a motion, can be born.”
In LOGIC magazine, Patrick Blanchfield critiques the tendency of both gun enthusiasts and gun control advocates to champion technology as a means of achieving their desired ends. The vision of the techno-solution “occludes the basic realities of political economy” that have created the current state of American gun culture—that is, “capitalism in general, and the arms trade in particular.”