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Verso shamed by Ross Perlin, intern buys groceries
As most young people, students, and recent college graduates are well aware, entering today's job market can be a terrifying endeavor. Long before the afterglow of post-secondary accomplishment has any time to fade (or even to appear, in the case of working students), the race is on for the next step toward gainful employment. In most cases, this means a highly competitive race to the bottom of the corporate ladder.
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"Shame is a weapon": Slavoj Žižek on the importance of WikiLeaks
Continuing his exploration of the wilder shores of political debate, Slavoj Žižek, author of Living in the End Times, offers a thought-provoking take on the WikiLeaks affair in the London Review of Books.
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"Really fantastic"; Luc Sante on The Invention of Paris
In in interview with Aaron Lake Smith for The Rumpus, Luc Sante calls The Invention of Paris "really fantastic" and characterizes Eric Hazan, the author, as a "kindred spirit." Sante's recent review of The Invention of Paris for the New York Review of Books praised Hazan's book as "one of the greatest books about the city anyone has written in decades." Demand for The Invention of Paris has been so great that Verso has sold through its hardcover printing in less than a year. A lovely paperback edition, with new full-color maps and illustrations, will be available in April 2011.
Visit The Rumpus to read the interview in full.
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Covering Our Bases
In a world of statistics and precision, in which "accountability" is now a Washington buzzword, there's one number no American—not even the president or the Pentagon—knows: the number of U.S. military bases currently dotting the globe. In a new piece for Tomdispatch.com, Nick Turse, author of The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, weighs in:
Last January, Colonel Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told me that there were nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts. He expected that number to increase by 12 or more, he added, over the course of 2010.
In September, I contacted ISAF's Joint Command Public Affairs Office to follow up. To my surprise, I was told that "there are approximately 350 forward operating bases with two major military installations, Bagram and Kandahar airfields." Perplexed by the loss of 50 bases instead of a gain of 12, I contacted Gary Younger, a Public Affairs Officer with the International Security Assistance Force. "There are less than 10 NATO bases in Afghanistan," he wrote in an October 2010 email. "There are over 250 U.S. bases in Afghanistan."
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Radical Thinkers: Judith Butler, Simon Critchley and Jacques Rancière
To celebrate publication of the fifth set of books in Verso's acclaimed Radical Thinkers series, you're invited to listen to some audio from an October 2009 event entitled "Radical Thinkers: Judith Butler, Simon Critchley and Jacques Rancière on the importance of critical theory to social movements today." The event took place at the New School in New York City where angry masses had to be turned away due to over-capacity.