Corey Robin's Blog, page 5

A few days ago, Michiko Kakutani (I didn’t even know she was still around) had a long piece in the Times on the Silicon Valley power elite’s embrace of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Kakutani expresses repeated puzzlement over Silicon Valley’s besottedness with these texts. Tolkien had a horror of technology and power politics, after all, which is clearly expressed in the trilogy, and his world seems as far away from Silicon Valley as his was from the Norse sagas he drew upon. I find myself puzzled by Kakutani’s puzzlement. It can hardly be a secret that The Lord of the Rings mirrors in many ways Wagner’s Ring Cycle and that Wagner also expressed horror for technology and power politics, […]

We know two things about Trump’s administration. First, it has declared war on trans people. Second, it has declared war on the administrative state. To my knowledge, nobody has yet figured out what the precise relationship between these two wars is. Till now. In this very stylish debut at The New Yorker, Paisley Currah explains why the war on trans people is not just the “opening move in a battle against vulnerable groups” or a crude attempt to “fan the flames of right-wing moral panic.” Instead, in banning a critical yet flexible tool for deciding the sex of individuals and populations, the right understands that it can completely undermine a major portion of the modern state as we know it. […]

In a bravura of a post, the historian Adam Tooze dismantles a lot of the cliches—so common to a certain style of Marxism associated with Moishe Postone, and to a deep strain of Heideggerianism—about the Holocaust being the telos, the logical triumph and end game, of industrial capitalism and/or industrial modernity. Tooze also addresses a common misconception regarding the genocide of the Jews: that somehow the obsessive transport of Jews to their death entailed such a massive diversion of material resources and personnel, that it ultimately hurt the German war effort, that even on the Nazis’ own terms and plans for imperial conquest, it was irrational to kill all the Jews. Tooze shows that such a view is an evasion […]

My last post, on cringey academic posting, generated a lot of debate on Facebook. In the course of that conversation, we got into a discussion about self-promotion of our work on social media, and why people are so anxious/apologetic about doing it. As I said on Facebook, I don’t really understand the anxiety about self-promotion. And that’s not because I have no anxieties about drawing attention to myself in real life. I do. Big time. I come from a big family. It’s always been hard to get a word in edgewise, when we’re all together, which as a kid, growing up, was every day. My tendency ever since has been to withdraw and watch. But writing is very different for […]

Why do academics and journalists and writers need to announce their professional good news or that of a friend or colleague or department with these cringey “amid the dark times, a bit of light” introductions? If you think these are dark times, the fact that a journal just accepted your article—or a publisher signed a contract for your co-edited anthology or your friend is now the dean or a favorite writer just got hired by a magazine—well, you can’t really believe any of this illuminates the darkness. Can’t you simply tell us your good news and trust that we’ll be happy for you without our having to run it through the cash register of the universe to see whether and […]

According to the New York Times, the scientist Richard Garwin has died. Garwin, as his biographer wrote, was “the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of.” At the age 0f 23, he built the H-bomb. He advised every president from Eisenhower to, who knows, probably Biden, on everything from nuclear deterrence to the MX Missile to arms control and more. Enrico Fermi said that he was “the only true genius I have ever met.” As it happens, I met him, too. It was the summer of 1985. I had just graduated high school and gotten a scholarship for college from IBM, where my dad worked. As part of my scholarship, I had the option of taking summer jobs with the […]

I know this headline and the story it tells are terrible, a sign of how bad things are and how much worse is to come, but, still… But, still, you have to laugh. Here we are, people of conscience everywhere, rallying on behalf of beleaguered universities everywhere, who are fending off this extraordinarily tetchy administration, so quick to take offense at the slightest untoward remark, and what do the leaders of NYU do? Freak out about this student, their commencement speaker, who had the audacity to refer to “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine,” and, so, naturally, is having his diploma revoked. Just in case that wasn’t clear enough, NYU issued a statement. Of course. NYU strongly denounces the choice […]

A new book about Biden’s decline and the 2024 campaign has tons of damning quotes from Democratic Party insiders. Apparently, Biden’s inner circle did a lot of covering just how far gone he was during the campaign. One insider tells the authors of the book, “It was an abomination. He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.” You’ve got to admire the moxie. Everyone’s always stealing an election from the Democrats. In 2016, it was the Russians. In 2024, it was the candidate they were supporting. This whole discourse is the ne plus ultra of a party that loses and loses yet always finds someone else to blame. Even if that someone else […]

Apparently, Stephen Miller thinks that Donald Trump can suspend the writ of habeas corpus. There’s just one problem with that idea, as a little known law professor wrote in the Cornell Law Review in 2014: “Congress alone can suspend the writ.” The name of that professor was Amy Coney Barrett.

In Capital and Black Reconstruction in America, respectively, Marx and Du Bois devote several passages to the fraught conceptions of ownership over labor in post-emancipation societies, whether the laborer is the Black freedman in the American South or the wage laborer in Western Europe. Though many people know that after emancipation, Black people in the South endured another hundred years of slavery by another name, that whites perceived Blacks as still belonging to some entity, we’re less familiar with a version of that story in Western Europe. Pairing these two passages raises delicate issues of comparison, but there’s no doubt that a similar dynamic is at play in both societies. In both societies, the employers of labor wrestle with the […]