On yesterday's Minnesota Public Radio Midmorning segment, Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation, squared off against David Lat, who declared internships a "win-win situation" in a New York Times Room for Debate piece earlier this week. 

Both Perlin and listeners who called in to join the discussion pointed out that internships that offer college credit in exchange for core work are often illegal and exploitative ways for employers to avoid compensating interns, and create situations in which interns are essentially paying tuition to work. Perlin also reiterated that internships routinely displace and replace regular employees, and bar those who can't afford to work for free form entire industries in which an unpaid internship serves as the only entry.

"I think the law as it stands is adequate," Perlin concluded, in response to Midmorning host Kerri Miller's question of whether the Department of Labor's internship guidelines needed to be changed. "We just need to see enforcement of the law, and interns understanding their rights and standing up for themselves." 

As the recent high-profile lawsuits against companies like Fox Searchlight and Hearst seem to indicate, more and more interns are fortunately doing just that.

Visit MPR Midmorning with Kerri Miller to hear the full podcast.

By Jennifer Pan / 08 February 2012 / post comment

Although he seems to be everywhere these days, Simon Critchley still finds the time to indulge in his obsessive reading habits. Currently steeped in the world of ancient Greek tragedy and fully absorbed by its "massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation," he recently shared with The Believer a short list of some of the standouts from his current reading list. 

With a good balance of the classic and the contemporary, the scholarly and the dramatic, he offers a diverse set of titles that are worth checking out to get a better idea of tragedy’s “savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to philosophy,” and, of course, its endless supply of insights into the present day. Not to mention the fact, as he rightfully notes, that Seneca and Euripides can just be a lot of fun to read!

Not to keep you in suspense about the list, visit The Believer to read Critchley's recommendations in full.

Simon Critchley's The Faith of the Faithless is also now out in hardback.

By Michael Bacal / 07 February 2012 / post comment

With the publication of Simon Critchley's Faith of the Faithless, the journal Political Theology has provided readers an excerpt from the introduction of the book on its blog, and is planning on hosting a series of longer responses to it in the coming weeks. 

In Critchley's introduction, you can find the conceptual foundations of the book's larger argument and its clearest elucidation of its titular trope, "the faith of the faithless." Together, these set the groundwork for the book's striking "experiments" in political theology and inform its bracing readings of Rousseau, Heidegger, St. Paul and Agamben. As the book's opening salvo, it also explicitly delineates the political dimensions of religious belief and theology today, and suggests how they may be properly thought in relation to the eventual possibilities for self-realization and the formation of collective bonds of identity organized around "infinitely demanding" ethical and political responsibilities and action.

For instance, in the introduction, he writes,

Continue Reading

By Michael Bacal / 07 February 2012 / post comment

Recent coverage of Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil? by Derrick O'Keefe includes:

An interview with O'Keefe on Redeye: Vancouver Cooperative Radio

An interview in The New Left Project

Ignatieff was a key figure in rallying liberal support for that disastrous, immoral war. In fact, on the night that the "Shock and Awe" invasion of Iraq began, Ignatieff was out with his Harvard colleague Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi ex-Trotskyite turned war hawk and key source for the neo-conservatives in Washington, D.C. Each in their own way, Ignatieff and Makiya were – to borrow the late Tony Judt’s description of liberal war boosters – "useful idiots" for the Bush administration. 

This alone would have qualified Ignatieff for inclusion in Verso’s Counterblasts, a series of polemical books aimed at key apologists for Empire and Capital. But I also wanted to examine the full arc of his career as a public intellectual; it seemed to contain lessons about the political retreat of the past 30 years and about the real nature of liberalism today.

And a blog post by O'Keefe on Rabble.ca

In general, however, there's been too much focus on personality over policy in analyzing Ignatieff's historic failure. We can start with a hat trick of concrete examples where political decisions -- all to varying degrees at odds with previous leader Stephane Dion -- managed to drive the party even lower in the polls.

Nothing about Ignatieff's spectacular failure in electoral politics seems to have humbled him. Witness his op-ed in the Financial Times last week advising new Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti on how to win the hearts and minds of the victims of looming austerity measures. The FT headline, making reference to Monti's nickname "the professor," is unintentionally hilarious: "One professor to another: listen to the people, or fail."

By Anne Sullivan / 07 February 2012 / post comment