In an article for Time Out, Danielle Goldstein asks if the recent protests are part of a new global movement? She reads Springtime as a document of the marchers' own story, and part of a growing movement to 'crack the looking glass.' Focusing on how the new rebellions have been represented in the voices of the participants through informal social media avenues as well as other publications like The Paper and Fight Back!, she asks Clare Solomon
Why 'Springtime' and why now?
'It's important that the students' voice is shown from the perspective of the students because the media is quite often biased. Peple will gain a different view of the movement and and be inspired to do things in their own communities.'
Why do the proceeds from the book go to Palestine Connect and not towards legal fees for those arrested while protesting?
'At the time there wasn't anything specific set up in Britain and Palestine Connect is rebuilding schools in the war-torn and occupied areas of Gaza, and we think it's important to make international links of solidarity.'
Nicholas Wroe recently interviewed John Berger for the Guardian's "A life in ..." series. Opening with an anecdote and sketch from Berger's newest book, Bento's Sketchbook, Wroe describes the drawing as "emblematic of Berger's career as combative art critic, radical writer and consistent challenger of institutional power. Here you have a snapshot not only of his relationship with art and the art world, but also of his relationship with society and authority in general."
Bento's Sketchbook is a characteristically sui generis work, combining an engagement with the thought of the 17th-century lens grinder, draughtsman and philosopher Baruch Spinoza with a study of drawing and a series of semi-autobiographical sketches, through which Berger attempts to explore the world around him and his place within it. We observe the bullishly fit and active octogenarian Berger climbing peach trees in his alpine village, talking to immigrants in Parisian suburbs and municipal swimming pools, attaching himself to a guided tour of the Wallace collection and reflecting on the physical and political similarities between the American folk radical Woody Guthrie and the Russian writer Andrei Platonov: "both lent their voices to those without a voice, and both confronted rural poverty".
"Spinoza has been in my head for a very long time," he explains. "Reading Marx as an 18-year-old, I remember him responding to a game in which he was asked to name his favourite philosopher. He said 'Spinoza'. It is in some ways a strange book - it is not directly a study of Spinoza or directly a book about drawing. I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible. It's no coincidence that Spinoza worked in the then new science of optics."
Internships, those much-touted indicators of "work experience" in the post-industrial economy, come at a heavy cost for students—particularly those who still pay tuition while performing unwaged work. As Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation, argues in his latest piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, colleges and universities are complicit in this process of tuition-theft, commonly known as "a foot in the door."
At institutions across the country, full-time, unpaid internships required for graduation are often charged at or near the normal tuition rate. In many cases, students seeking to avoid this expense are not permitted to find and complete the needed internship on their own. The result is tantamount to outsourcing part of a student's degree while still sticking them with the bill (which can run upward of $14,000).
Ian James is full of praise for Michel Surya's Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography in the Times Literary Supplement. Focusing on Bataille's political and philosophical thought, James writes that"Bataille's thinking elaborates an all-embracing cosmological vision of material and human life inscribed within a general economy of excess, expenditure, ruination and death".
James notes that Bataille's sensational life and work can in no way be fitted into a singular narrative. Nevertheless, there are threads running throughout Bataille's work (both fiction and theory) and his life, notably his lifelong committment to materialism:
Surya, perhaps more than any other commentator, does justice to the intimacy of the relation that subsisted between Bataille's life and his writing, and to the complexity of their interrelation. Despite their resolutely paradoxical, enigmatic or incomplete qualities, Bataille's life and writing are, Surya shows, united by a sustained concern to affirm and elaborate an uncompromising anti-idealism. If he was fascinated by the debauched the filthy, and the work of death, it was because he held ideality of any kind to whatsoever to be a dangerous repression of the base materiality of life ...
An Associated Press story on Intern Nation, drawing extensively on an interview with author Ross Perlin by Leanne Italie, is spreading the internship debate—and news of the groundbreaking book—like wildfire, with syndication to, among others, The Republic, Canadian Business Online, ABC News, Forbes, MSNBC ...
Believe it or not, the story opens with reference to Charlie Sheen, before, thankfully, segueing swiftly into the legality of many internships:
Charlie Sheen's paid tweet for an intern with tiger blood summoned 82,148 people hoping to serve the warlock.
As internships go, at least it's a paid gig with a real job description: eights weeks helping the actor with social media at $10 an hour. That's more than many interns get, said Ross Perlin, who leaps into the fray over internships in a new book, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy (Verso Books).
"The Charlie Sheen thing, it's the most competitive internship ever," Perlin told The Associated Press in an interview. "The most sought after, and it sort of beautifully sums up the absurdity of what's going on with this incredible explosion of internships."
Perlin views the competition for internships among college kids and even jobless grads and high schoolers, as not only absurd, but even legally questionable when measured against labor laws governing internships.
One of the many places to read the article in full is at the ABC News site.